


Unwell

by Fearful_little_thing



Series: Sick Heart [2]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: (sort of), Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon-Typical Violence, Derek Hale Needs Therapy, Frottage, HaleCest, Laura Hale had good intentions, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Past Psychological Trauma, Peter Hale is a Psychopath, Scott is still bitten, Slow Burn, Soulmates, True Mates, implied bisexuality, narrator does not have all the facts, season one AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-28
Updated: 2020-03-06
Packaged: 2021-02-27 15:40:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 11
Words: 38,257
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22449577
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fearful_little_thing/pseuds/Fearful_little_thing
Summary: aka 'How certain circumstances can lead to supporting your partner's choice to commit homicide'-Derek Hale was in therapy for six years. He's been diagnosed, used in case studies, counselled and gaslit and told that his feelings are simply a result of childhood trauma. According to various therapists he's delusional. He's unstable, and not fit to look after himself.Looking at where he is now, back in Beacon Hills after six years away, they might have been at least partially right about that last bit.
Relationships: Derek Hale/Peter Hale, background Allison Argent/Scott McCall
Series: Sick Heart [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1615369
Comments: 38
Kudos: 135





	1. Chapter One - A Good Case Study

**Author's Note:**

> I've written about 60-80% of this fic, depending on which direction the ending goes. I normally wait until I've written the whole thing before I start posting something, but I'm hoping for some help in choosing which of those directions I'm going to go in. 
> 
> Tags may be added to as the story progresses.

Quarter past five. The clock on the wall counted each second as it passed by with the steady click of its internal mechanisms. Analogue time, tangible in a way that digitally displayed numbers couldn't quite emulate. Analogue had a noise, a movement, to let you know that the world hadn't frozen between the seconds. Time was still moving – it was only his perception that made it seem like it was standing still.

A deep sigh.

The woman in the chair opposite him adjusted her seat, one hand on her clipboard, the other still holding the pen that hadn't written anything since he'd first sat down.

Marlena McCaffery. Five foot four, grey hair, wire-framed glasses. Psychiatrist.

Watching him with a veiled air of disappointment.

“I know it's difficult, changing therapists,” Marlena rallied with her third attempt at starting a dialogue after the 'hello, how are you' small talk that had taken up the first minute of their meeting. “It's hard, needing to rebuild that trust with someone new. We don't need to talk about anything you don't want to, you don't have to bring up anything that would make you uncomfortable. I want this to be a safe space for you, Derek. I want you to be as comfortable with me as you were with Dr Zellek.”

Derek snorted under his breath.

Naturally, Marlena noticed. “You weren't comfortable with Dr Zellek?”

“I'm not comfortable with therapy.”

A beat of silence.

The clock continued to tick in the background.

Marlena consulted her clipboard – his patient file condensed down to a few sheets of paper and a letter of referral. “Can you tell me why that is?”

Derek twitched a shoulder in a half-shrug, not even bothering to uncross his arms. “I don't need it.”

Actually, he probably did. Not that he would admit it aloud, and especially not to his latest psychiatrist. His psychiatrist would only tell his sister, and his sister would use that to push him into situations more uncomfortable or painful than this. She could alpha-order him into going to therapy, could have herself appointed as his guardian (almost twenty-two and he still had a guardian), could even order him into talking during his sessions. She couldn't – wouldn't – ever make him think that his experiences weren't what had happened.

Six years and she'd never been able to do that.

It drove her up the wall that he refused to see things the way she wanted him to.

Marlena's eyebrows twitched, her professionally neutral expression slipping sideways into mild curiosity. “But you keep coming back,” she pointed out, flicking back another page in his file. “You were with Dr Zellek for two years, and I have records from another therapist before that. You were only referred to me because of Dr Zellek's retirement. If you didn't think you needed therapy then why do you keep going?”

“Because my sister makes me.” A simple answer to a complicated question. Derek slumped a little lower in his chair. He tipped his head back to look at the ceiling. “She thinks I need therapy.”

“You're an adult, Derek. Your sister can't make you do anything you don't want her to.”

Another snort. Something a little closer to a laugh, though there was no humour in it. “Sure.”

“Sometimes when we say someone is making us do something what we mean is that they make us feel guilty if we don't. Or sometimes they present us with unpleasant outcomes if we refuse. You feel like your sister is pressuring you to seek therapy because she'll be disappointed if you don't?”

“She has control of my money,” Derek said bluntly. “She can cut me off if I don't go.”

“That sounds like a very stressful situation.”

“No shit.”

And that wasn't even taking into account the whole werewolf aspect, or the reluctantly codependent nature of a damaged blue-eyed beta and an alpha with no other pack. Theirs was not a healthy dynamic to begin with.

“Alright. I can understand why you don't want to be here,” Marlena acknowledged with a nod. “But since it looks like you're forced to go anyway, don't you think it would be better to talk about some things while you're here? It would be better than just sitting here staring at the wall, don't you think?”

A shrug.

Whatever. It's not like she could declare him any less sane than he already had been. Being committed was never an issue – Laura would never let him be locked up. She needed her beta more than she needed her little brother to fully deal with his trauma.

“Sure,” Derek said eventually.

“Okay, good.” Marlena smiled slightly. “So we can start with something easy. Something we've already touched on a little bit just now...Why don't you tell me why your sister thinks you should be in therapy?”

Something easy. Right.

Derek's mouth twitched slightly, threatening a sarcastic smile as he recited; “Because our family burned to death in a house fire. They were okay with me being in a relationship with my maternal uncle when I was fifteen. I still think I'm in love with him. I also sometimes have _delusions_ ,” he added the finger-quotes, knowing full well that all of this was in his file somewhere, “and present with violent tendencies. I may or may not think I'm a werewolf.”

-

Dr Marlena McCaffery was Derek's fourth therapist in six years.

His first had been a very nice man that Laura had found by googling 'therapists in my area' two months after moving them across the country as far away from Beacon Hills as she could get. She'd cajoled rather than ordered for that one, claiming that they both needed grief counselling after everything that had happened.

At the time Derek had been too numb to fight her on it. He'd gone along because he didn't have the energy to do anything else, the black hole in his chest sucking the life out of him until he was hardly more than a shell. He went through the motions, floating through everything on autopilot.

The sessions had helped.

He'd learned to live with the hole, learned to start feeling things _around_ it instead of letting it swallow him up. He'd progressed into being functional enough to even go back to school, though he was held back a year to make up for the months of mourning.

He came up with a plan. Wait until he was eighteen and Laura couldn't stop him – oh, he'd been so naive – then go back to Beacon Hills and be with Peter again. He could move his uncle out of the long term care ward at Beacon Hills Memorial, become his carer. He didn't even care if Peter was still catatonic, just being around him would have been enough.

And then Laura had dropped the first of her most insidious alpha-orders.

She'd made him tell the therapist about his relationship with his uncle.

Suddenly he was being referred to a psychiatrist that specialised in victims of childhood abuse.

He stayed with Dr Kepler for the next year and a half, fighting it the entire time. Laura got angry with him for that, for refusing to agree that what he'd experienced was grooming.

“He never said a word until I did!” Derek exploded on her one night, eyes flaring bright blue at her across the living room in their apartment and claws threatening to sprout from his fingers. “All those bullshit things you want me to believe happened – that he coerced me, that he must have been telling me stories or feeding me lies – that never happened!”

Alpha red flared back at him, Laura's face stony with anger. “You were fifteen,” she replied coldly, “no matter which way you slice it, he took advantage of you.”

“By what!? What did he do, Laura? Because he never broke any of mom's rules –”

“Mom's rules,” Laura scoffed. “That is so fucked up, you realise, that our own mom let that happen. She practically gift-wrapped you.”

“She did what was best for me.”

“ _Best_ for you!?” Laura actually laughed, incredulity turning the sound cruel. “In what world was it _best_ for you to start 'dating' our _uncle_?”

“Would you rather I died, Laura? Because I would've done it – I would've fucking done it – she caught me with my claws in my arms, okay?” Derek hissed, dropping his voice from a shout at the last second. The last thing they needed was for the neighbours to call the police on them (again). “That's the _only_ reason I told her. I thought I was fucked up for loving him and I was going to fucking kill myself, I was just working my way up to it. You see these?” He held up his arms for her to see and showed her his wrists, spotless and blemish free. “Clean, right? Werewolves don't scar without fire.”

When Dr Kepler referred him on to Dr Zellek, citing a too-heavy case load and a need to focus on his younger patients, Laura made him admit to a history of self harm as well as the rest of it.

Of course without the scars to prove it, his descriptions of clawed-up arms got downgraded to 'intrusive thoughts of self harm'.

His fantasies of flying back to California when he turned eighteen were neatly smashed to pieces. Hobbled by legal processes and by Laura's insistence that he was better off with her.

“You're not going back to Beacon Hills, Derek,” Laura told him firmly, the underlying tone of 'alpha' in her voice. “Not while I'm alive.”

It was around about then that Derek's anger issues started to become a problem. He just barely graduated high school, squeaking under the wire with grades obtained by extensions and special accommodations during exams.

No colleges wanted him. His attitude and presentation meant that nobody wanted to hire him.

But apparently he made a great case study when it came to early teen developmental psychology, so there was that.

-

_Derek,_

_I'm sorry I couldn't stay and tell you in person, but I have a flight in half an hour and I'm going to be rushing to make it as it is. Something's come up with the estate and I need to go out of town for a couple of days to sort it out. I've left money for groceries and gas on the table and I took a taxi so the car's still in the parking lot if you need it._

_I hope you had a good first session with Dr McCaffery, the reviews online say she's very good._

_Don't eat nothing but pizza while I'm gone._

_Love you,_

_Laura._

-

The note was left pinned to the refrigerator underneath a novelty magnet shaped like a donut. Derek read it, then crumpled it up and tossed it in the bin. Voicemail existed for a reason, but Laura was under the impression that if she left him a message that way it would be too easy for him to 'forget' to check it. Notes were harder to ignore, in her opinion.

She also seemed to think that if she wasn't there to force him to leave the apartment then he'd just hole up in his room and become an urban hermit.

Inaccurate.

Derek hated the forced interaction that came with leaving the apartment, but he'd deal with it in order to get whatever it was he needed. The lure of a good coffee trumped the minor inconvenience of being stared at or spoken to.

He checked the contents of the fridge, then went to count the money on the table.

Three hundred in cash. More than he'd been expecting, but not too unusual if she wasn't sure when she'd be back. This was money for a week, he noted, maybe two. Groceries, gas, a little extra in case he decided to eat out.

Derek folded up the money and stuffed it into his wallet, resentment crawling up the back of his throat as he thought about what Laura might be doing. She hadn't specifically said she was going to Beacon Hills, but that's what 'the estate' meant. The house. The land. And Peter.

Laura got to fly back to California.

Derek got to stay in New York and pretend he didn't hate everything around him from the throw pillows on the couch to the 'live love laugh' sign on the wall.

-

After two days of instant ramen and boredom, Derek was hit with a sudden bolt of awareness.

He snapped upright, back ramrod straight, hair at the back of his neck prickling. An odd sense of vertigo gripped him and for a minute it felt as if he wasn't actually in his body but rather watching everything from a weird distance. As if his eyes belonged to someone else and he was just looking through them. The black hole in his chest was back, swallowing up the world around him. He couldn't feel the carpet under his toes or the clothes against his skin.

Disassociation.

He recognised the feeling from once before.

Derek sat down heavily on the floor with a 'thump' that probably bothered the downstairs neighbours.

Because the last time – the last time he'd felt anything at all like this he'd been not-quite-sixteen. The last time he'd felt like this it was because everyone was dying, his subconscious reacting to a supernatural awareness of pack that had ceased to exist.

“Mom,” he whispered. The first alpha of his that had died. Derek's hands started to tremble, his vision blurred. “Laura,” he choked. “No...”

She couldn't be dead, he reasoned, the detached part of him that existed outside of his body. She just couldn't be. She was the thorn in his side, the constant needle, a seed of hate mixed with the love for a sister and the respect/resentment of a too-strict alpha.

If she was dead, his entire world was about to fall apart.

If she was dead, his distant self reasoned, then none of her orders held any sway over him.

Derek watched himself get to his feet. He was a passenger in his body as it grabbed a backpack from the cupboard and stuffed it full with a change of clothes, a charger for his phone, and a few other bits and pieces. His hands zipped the bag and palmed the keys to Laura's car. They checked his wallet for cash and ID and then his feet took him out the front door.

He watched himself get into Laura's car in the basement car park.

It struck him as he pulled out onto the street that he shouldn't be driving in this state. He wasn't paying attention, wasn't present like he should be, and that made him dangerous behind the wheel.

His body ignored the thought like it ignored everything else and followed the GPS instead.

If Laura were still alive he shouldn't have even been able to program it to take him to Beacon Hills.

He came back to himself on the highway outside the city, hours later than he should have. Middle of the night, fingers numb with cold from the AC while sweat gathered on his forehead. Tank half empty.

“What am I doing?” Derek asked under his breath. And then louder, because the question was worth repeating; “What am I doing?”

Beacon Hills was a ridiculous distance to drive. He had just under three hundred dollars to his name and an emergency credit card with a limit not much higher than that. Even if he slept in the car he'd have barely anything left over by the time he got to California. What he was doing wasn't practical. It was an idiot move.

An impulse move, all instinct and no brain.

“But it's not as if I could afford a flight either,” he muttered. “Talking to yourself,” Derek noted a beat later. “One symptom you didn't already have. Good going. Great progress.”

He also couldn't afford rent on his own. Not until he got access to whatever assets his sister had left behind – whenever it was that she was identified as being deceased. _If_ he was able to get access. There was a paper trail a mile long detailing exactly how unfit Derek was to manage his own life.

He'd probably be assigned a case worker by the state. Another person who'd have control of his money and who could withhold it if he didn't meet the agreed upon terms.

He'd have to keep going to therapy.

He'd have to keep himself from appearing unhinged as he struggled to navigate his sudden change from beta to omega...

On the other hand was Beacon Hills.

_Peter_ was in Beacon Hills. And so was Laura's body – wherever it was.

He could sleep in the car still, or in the woods, or in what remained of the old house. He'd seen it before they left, there was enough left standing that he'd have a roof over his head at least... assuming it hadn't deteriorated too much in the last six years. That would do for a temporary stop before he figured out what to do.

And he could see Peter.

Finally. _Finally_. After six years.

The thought was almost overwhelming, the idea blotting out even the horrible knowledge of his sister's death. The black hole in his chest throbbed, aching for the part of himself he'd been forced to leave behind in the ICU at Beacon Hills Memorial.

“Alright,” Derek said to himself. “Alright. So that's the plan. Get to Beacon Hills. Get to the house. Go see Peter.”

He could figure out what he hell he was going to do after that.


	2. Chapter Two - Survivors Guilt Bullshit/Long Term Effects of Emotional Trauma

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Derek arrives in Beacon Hills and is immediately waylaid by an emotionally draining task. Later, unexpected developments occur at Beacon Hills Memorial.

The plan met with a hitch the instant Derek stepped out of the car outside the burnt out shell of his childhood home.

It was close to how he remembered seeing it the last time he stood there, just a few short weeks after the fire. The house looked the same – blackened wood, broken windows, collapsed in on itself but somehow still mostly standing – but trees had started to reclaim the space that had once been the back yard, the grass overgrown and full of weeds where there used to be garden beds.

Derek took a deep breath as he stretched out muscles that were tight after being in one position for too long. He relaxed part way, then tensed back up again as his brain parsed the smells his deep breath had brought with it.

Time had removed the smoke and char, but there was an odd note being carried on the breeze beneath the scent of bark and loam.

A familiar smell, faint and threaded through with sour metallic tang. Blood. The first, barest hints of meat starting to turn bad. Laura's shampoo.

Derek moved through the woods without a second thought, senses on high alert as he followed the smells back to their source. Back to Laura, the half of her that was left. Small and naked, staring into oblivion with her hair splayed around her in the mud.

For a second Derek's faltered. He swayed, knees feeling strange and threatening to collapse him. Then he straightened, hands balled into fists.

_Hunters_ cut wolves in half.

His sister had deserved better than that, no matter what bad blood might have festered between them.

Without thinking much past wanting to put her to rest, Derek gathered the corpse in his arms and carried it back to the house. He found a shovel in the garden shed – the structure miraculously untouched and only grown over with weeds – a coil of old rope hanging on the wall. The wolfsbane was harder, but it still grew in places throughout the preserve. He plucked it with his bare hands and ignored the sting, mild compared to everything else.

A spiral. A sprig of wolfsbane to mark the centre, and he laid his sister to rest as best as he could with only the half of her to bury.

It only occurred to him when he was washing off in the creek how incredibly morbid that was. To dig a grave outside the house where nearly his whole family had died. To go back to that house after he was done bathing and sleep on the floor in the hallway where there was still a roof overhead and no windows to let in the breeze.

Maybe he really was disturbed.

He snorted humourlessly to himself. Six years of psychological analysis and gaslighting must have done some real damage somewhere.

-

The long term care ward at Beacon Hills Memorial was technically a nursing home. Owned and operated by a third party that leased the otherwise-unused hospital wing from the board, it had it's own payroll and staff (and billing department). It was the best care money could buy in Beacon County – not that people generally had much of a choice.

There was no big difference between the hallways in long term care and the rest of the hospital. The atmosphere didn't change, the architecture and decoration was the same the full way through.

Derek followed the signs to the reception desk, shoulders stiff beneath his jacket.

Reception desks reminded him of waiting rooms, and he'd spent too much time in those over the years.

He approached the desk, consciously willing his face into an expression that didn't telegraph his distaste. A fake smile was socially acceptable – his resting bitch face tended to make people think he was about to explode.

“Hi,” Derek made sure to keep his voice light, to look the nurse in the eyes, and to keep his clenched fists out of sight. “I'm looking for Peter Hale?”

The nurse behind the desk blinked at him, then smiled. “Peter Hale,” she repeated, “room sixteen. If you wait just a moment and I'll take you over myself. I just have to... finish this and.... there.” The nurse clicked something on the screen, then came around the side of the desk. “If you'll follow me?”

Derek nodded stiffly, concentrating too hard on not looking threatening as he did so.

He followed the nurse down the hall, the woman chatting as she went; “He's our longest standing resident, you know. Coming up on six years soon, poor man. Never had a single visitor until just this week if you'll believe it and now he'll have had two in the past four days! Oh, not that I'm judging, mind,” she added with a glance at Derek to make sure he wasn't offended, “it can be difficult to see someone when they're in his state.”

“Mm,” Derek agreed, not sure what the hell else he could say. It wasn't as if he could explain that his sister had forbidden him from visiting and he could only do it now because she was dead and her orders no longer bound him.

“Here we are,” the nurse said finally, stopping by a door with the number sixteen marked on it in plain black lettering. She opened the door and walked inside without announcing herself, crossing immediately to the window to adjust the curtains. “Stay as long as you like,” she said to Derek, who hovered uncertainly in the doorway, “we have someone pop in every hour just to check in, but there's a call button by the bed if you or Peter need anything.”

“Thank you,” Derek said stiffly, because what the hell else was he going to say to that.

“You're welcome.”

The nurse smiled at him patiently, clearly waiting for him to do something.

It took a second for Derek to realise he was still standing in the doorway. He stepped into the room and out of the way, anxiety making his heart pound far too loud in his ears.

The nurse left, shutting the door behind her on the way, and suddenly Derek was standing there alone with his uncle. There with him in the same room for the first time in far too long.

He actually felt dizzy.

Less than three steps separated them, Peter sitting silent and unmoving in a wheelchair that had been positioned to face the window. Derek stared at the back of his head, vision fuzzy as he tried to compose himself enough to cross the room.

One foot in front of the other, Derek made himself walk across the bare linoleum floor until he was standing in front of his uncle. His breath caught at the sight of him – blue eyes staring blankly from an impassive face, hair longer than Derek had ever seen it before – heart and lungs squeezed tight as the black hole contracted.

“Peter,” Derek breathed his uncle's name, nearly dropping to his knees right there in front of the other man. He slowly moved to a crouch, reached out to take his hand but hesitated at the last second.

Pink, waxy scars wound their way across Peter's skin, his right hand curled up into a twisted claw shape on his lap. Licks of scar tissue dotted the left hand, not nearly as bad as the right but still marked by the fire that had nearly killed him. His left side had been spared the worst of it, that side of his face still the way Derek remembered it while the right was nothing but shiny pink scars.

He didn't care about the scars though, his hesitation only because he didn't know if touching them would cause the other wolf pain.

Were scars painful? Derek wondered, never having had any himself. Or were they like tattoos – painful to acquire but without any lingering hurt once they'd healed. He hoped it was the latter, but only touched Peter's left hand just in case.

His skin was warm. His scent so similar to how Derek remembered, only overlaid by medication and the pine-sol smell that was always present in hospital rooms.

The worst thing, Derek decided, his own eyes stinging, were Peter's eyes.

Just as blue, just as beautiful as he remembered... but empty. Unchanging. Like he didn't even know that Derek was there.

“I'm sorry,” Derek started, his voice soft and choked with emotion. “I couldn't... come sooner. Laura – she... She was my alpha, and she told me I couldn't come. Not as long as she was alive. I wanted – wanted to. I was going to come back years ago. I was going to find a place and move you in with me. I was going to... take care of you... I just...”

The words choked off, his throat closed up. Tears fell, carving too-hot trails down his cheeks that went icy cold under the hospital ward's climate control.

The black hole in Derek's chest pulsed, screaming for his heart mate (his soulmate) who was _right there_ but unable to see him.

“She's dead,” Derek forced the words out through his closed-up throat, cracked and whispery. “I knew she was. I found her. But I knew she was before that. She'd never let me come here. She wanted me to hate you. I can't hate you. I can't – I love you. I love you so fucking much it's killing me. I'm even glad she's dead because it means I can be here,” Derek barked out a laugh, the sound harsh with self-loathing. “How fucked up is that? How– ... She fucked me up. Six years, she... I never wanted to leave you.”

He collapsed then. Just crumpled in on himself, on his knees in front of his uncle's chair, head bent down over Peter's knees as he cried into the blanket covering the other man's legs. Clinging to Peter's hand with his own as if it were a lifeline, silently begging for relief.

Derek didn't know how long he stayed like that. Crying until he'd run out of tears and his knees hurt from kneeling on the hard floor.

Eventually he took a deep, shuddering breath and slowly moved back.

“Kk.”

A gurgle of sound. A twitch of a finger.

Derek froze.

“Drr'kk...”

Breath caught in his chest, Derek pulled back enough to look up at his uncle's face. There was awareness that hadn't been there before, Peter's sharp blue eyes locked on Derek's face. His hand twitched again, stronger this time, fingers reaching for Derek's own.

“Peter,” Derek breathed, hardly able to believe it.

He knew that Peter had been catatonic since being moved out of the ICU – had known since he'd eavesdropped on Laura's arrangements for him in the long term ward. At the time the doctors hadn't been able to say whether it was physiological or just a psychological reaction to the stress his body and mind had been put through. And he knew, both from eavesdropping and from arguments with his sister, that in all the years since Peter had never showed any signs of awareness of the world around him.

Derek shifted his weight, mouth opening to call aloud for the nurse.

Peter's hand shot out before he could stand, fingers clamping tight around his wrist. “No,” he said, the words croaky and strangled but clear just the same. “No... nurse.”

“Jesus. Peter, you're... you're awake,” Derek whisper-hissed back, dropping back down in front of the other wolf. “I can't believe – are you – I should...”

“Night nurse... Jennifer. Knows.” Peter's eyebrows were drawn, a look of frustration clear on his face – anger at his own body for refusing to move at the pace he wanted.

“The night nurse knows,” Derek repeated, a dizzying array of emotions cycling through him.

Elation, confusion, concern... and anger, burning in the background. A simmering, boiling thing that cursed Laura and her good intentions. Her orders had kept him away. He hadn't had the _opportunity_ to know that Peter was coming out of whatever had kept him silent and unresponsive. He should have been there. He should have _known_.

How long had it been? How much had he missed?

“But you don't want anyone else to know,” Derek continued, pushing the anger down and stuffing all of the other emotions into a little box so he could concentrate. “You don't trust anyone else. You trust Jennifer.”

“No.” The word was barked out this time, harsh and unyielding. Peter growled low in the back of his throat; “Hard... to come out of it. Easier with the moon. Still... healing.”

“I'm not going anywhere,” Derek promised, both of his hands clasping his uncle's left between them. Holding on like the older man was his lifeline... and he was. Always had been. “Take as long as you need. I don't care. I don't care. Just talk to me.”

“Taken this long.”

“I'm patient,” Derek said, and then laughed. Because he really, really wasn't.

It took a moment, seconds stretching on while Peter struggled against himself, each second bringing with it more control. His eyes were drinking in Derek's features in the meantime, clearly cataloguing every change in his nephew's visage – the cheekbones that had only grown sharper, the hint of a five o'clock shadow. Shoulders that were a bit wider than they used to be.

“Jennifer...” he said eventually, each syllable clear and carefully shaped, “is not to be trusted. She has... an obsessive personality. Believes she is special, an angel of mercy. She noticed I don't respond to drugs the same way as other patients. She observed me, saw my claws on the full moon and came to conclusions. She believes I will change her, give her power, so she does what I say... for now.”

Slowly, like he was testing how far his body would let him move, Peter rolled his head from side to side, stretching out the muscles in his neck. “Other nurses, other doctors, would be compelled to update my file,” he continued, speaking like the man Derek remembered, his voice just as smooth as it had been six years ago. “I can't have that. I'm being watched, you see. Passively monitored. Your coming here will be noted,” he added, eyes locked with Derek's, “you'll be a target now, when she comes here. She may even think it's you...”

“Who?”

Peter smiled slightly, the scars on the right half of his face pulling tight. “Ms DeSilva. Katharine Argent. The woman who burned our family alive.”

Shocked, for a moment Derek couldn't do anything but stare at his uncle.

He hadn't actually thought about it before, not enough to put it all together. When the fire had happened, Derek had shut down. He'd been too lost in grief over losing his family – over being separated from his _soulmate_ – that he hadn't actually given a thought to who had set the fire.

Laura had been tight-lipped. She never spoke about it, except when she was ordering him to speak about it with his psychiatrists. The investigation had ruled the fire as an accident, and that was the story Derek had been forced to repeat whenever it came up in therapy. Their family's inability to escape was hand-waved away as being part of his ongoing passive delusions.

Gaslit again.

How many fucking things had Laura been keeping from him?

“ _Argent_ ,” Derek repeated, some of his anger bleeding through as he shook his head. “I should have known. I should have fucking known. Laura –”

“ _Laura_ ,” Peter ground out the name from between clenched teeth, true venom in every sound. “She didn't tell you, did she?”

“Tell me what?”

“Oh, she didn't say a word...”

“Tell me fucking _what_ , Peter?”

“Laura told Argent about us. You and me,” Peter hissed, a red ring burning at the edges of his irises, “are the justification she needed to set us all on fire. She told me. She told me why she did it, why she _left me here_. Precious alpha always knows best.”

Alpha.

A red ring burning in Peter's eyes.

It hit Derek like a kick to the chest. The realisation. What must have happened.

It was easier with the moon, Peter said. He was able to pull himself out of his catatonic state – must have been able to for some time. The night nurse knew, and she helped him ('she does what I say'). She could easily have helped him leave at night, on a full moon, when he'd be at his strongest. Laura had come back to Beacon Hills because of something to do with the estate. She'd probably been keeping tabs on the area, maybe even on Peter himself, either out of a feeling of obligation or guilt. She'd died. Peter's eyes were glowing red.

“You killed her,” Derek said aloud, wavering somewhere between horror and the dark satisfaction of relief.

Peter's smile was cracked and defiant. The glow faded from his eyes. “Do you hate me, duckling?”

“...no.” How could he? A part of him felt like he'd been mourning his sister since the fire, she'd been so different afterwards. Too concerned with trying to fix him to see how much damage she was really doing. Derek shook his head. “She's my sister, but... I told you before. I'm not sorry she's dead. I wouldn't be here, with you, if she wasn't dead.”

“I wondered,” Peter admitted after a moment, staring at Derek's face as if he could read the younger man's thoughts if only he tried hard enough. “Sometimes... When I was lucid enough to feel the passing of time. I wondered if you stayed away because you wanted to, or because she'd turned you against me. If you'd forgotten me...”

“ _Never_ ,” Derek said vehemently, conviction so strong that Peter looked stunned.

“There are some things...” Peter sounded choked again, the weight of emotion pressing down on him, “I should tell you... Things you need to know about –”

“I don't care,” Derek cut him off, leaning forward into his personal space. He reached up and put his hands on Peter's face, cupping his jaw. “I don't care. I don't fucking care. Tell me later – too much talking – I haven't even kissed you yet.”

His uncle's eyes sparked with hunger. His good hand hooked around the back of Derek's neck and pulled him closer, much stronger than he looked while still sitting in a wheelchair. “God, yes.”

Their lips touched, and for Derek it felt like finally coming home.

_This_ is what he'd been missing for the past six years. This feeling of being complete, of being wanted, knowing that he was loved with the same overwhelming fierceness that he loved with. The horrible, sucking emptiness that he'd felt for so long felt like it disappeared... all from one kiss.

And the taste – one he'd almost forgotten, that he chased with his tongue against Peter's bottom lip – unique in its composition. He never wanted to forget that taste.

-

Later that night Derek sat on the blackened stairs in his old childhood home, staring off into nothingness as he tried to process everything. He could still feel his uncle's lips against his. He kept touching his mouth with his fingertips, rubbing the pads over his lips. They'd kissed until they heard one of the day-nurses stop at the door, the footsteps and the polite rap at the door just enough warning for Derek to jump back to a respectable distance. Peter, facing away from the door, had been free to smirk at his nephew's blush. A few words, an assurance that everything was fine, and the nurse had left... but the mood had been broken.

There were things Peter had wanted to talk about anyway.

Things that were now knocking around in Derek's head, facts and information cycling through in a loop. He wasn't able to sleep, his mind too full to switch off.

“Think about it,” Peter had said at the end, just before Derek had been forced to leave when visiting hours came to a close. “I'll never force you to do anything, duckling. If you want no part of it, that's fine.”

The problem was, Derek was pretty sure that all of the broken, jagged parts of him were all for it. His anger still burned. The emptiness in his chest was gone, but the anger remained. A constant darkness in the back of his mind made up of resentment, loneliness, grief, and pain. Dr McCaffery would probably say that the root of it was in the trauma he'd experienced, that anger was his method of coping with what had happened.

He doubted that any of his former therapists would be too thrilled to hear that his coping mechanisms may eventually lead to premeditated homicide.

Because that's what he was thinking about.

Killing the people who were responsible for the fire that had destroyed his life and put his heart mate through so much pain.

Peter had laid everything out very plainly. He'd described the honey-trail that had already been laid with the presence of the spiral, the research compiled with Jennifer's help that neatly identified all parties and their roles. The cover-up, the arsonists, the hired muscle, even the source of Argent's information on untraceable accelerants. By taking them out one by one he'd be laying a clear trail that Kate herself would be unable to resist.

It was practically screaming her name.

“Besides which,” Peter had added flippantly, “she promised me she'd come if ever I healed enough to get out of bed. She wont pass up the opportunity for another kill.”

And once it was done, Peter would 'miraculously recover', take control of his assets again, and 'travel to Europe for plastic surgery'. He had Jennifer in place to lay paperwork as needed, so even if things started going sideways he'd have records detailing his recovery and discharge from the care facility. He planned on turning her in once it was all done – she hadn't tried her angel of mercy routine on any other patients since discovering Peter's true nature, but he doubted that would last. No one would believe her if she started spouting off about werewolves and hunters anyway.

A neat solution.

There was only one loose cog in the machine – a mistake made in the heat of the moment, according to Peter.

He'd bitten someone.

A teenager. A boy in the woods near the half of Laura's body that Derek had found.

“It was the wrong one,” Peter had insisted, an odd turn of phrase that Derek hadn't thought anything of at the time. “The wrong place, the wrong time. My jaws were dug into his side before I realised. I didn't know you were coming,” he added, stroking his fingers through Derek's hair. “I didn't realise I still had pack."

If omegas alone could become unhinged for want of pack, alphas were worse. Derek remembered that much from the folklore passed down through the Hale pack. It made sense that his uncle would have been desperate enough to bite anyone who came across his path at the wrong moment.

So, assuming the boy hadn't died, there was a new bitten wolf out there somewhere. Clueless, and a potential spanner in the works. A potential ally for a manipulative hunter to use to her advantage.

A mass murder waiting to happen when the boy inevitably couldn't handle his first full moon.

Which meant he had to be dealt with. Identified and taught at least basic control so he wouldn't fuck things up for them by drawing attention or doing anything stupid like allying with hunters.

Fantastic.


	3. Chapter Three - Severe Anxiety in Social Situations

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Derek encounters some strangers and gets to practice his sarcasm. Later he promises to take on a potentially unpleasant job.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm officially starting uni (for the first time ever, in my thirties) on monday. This likely means that updates past chapter 6 or 7 will slow down considerably. That said - I think I know how I'm ending this fic now and have no intentions of leaving it unfinished.

At quarter past four in the afternoon, unnaturally loud in the otherwise silent old house, Derek’s phone buzzed. It was reflex to check, even though the only person who ever actually texted him was buried in the back garden.

The first thing he noticed was the battery symbol. Red and blinking at ten percent.

The second was the actual message.

It was from a number he didn’t recognise, but signed at the bottom with ‘Marlena McCaffery, PhD’;

Hi Derek, I noticed you didn’t show for our appointment yesterday and since we haven’t received any cancellation notice I thought I’d check in and make sure everything is OK. I’ve texted your sister as well. Please give me a call if you need to talk.

_Sure._

Derek turned the screen off and stared at the black, shiny surface.

He thought resentfully of what his therapist – or any therapist – would say in regards to his current situation.

The thought that maybe he should call passed idly through his mind. Bad habits. He was so used to being strong-armed into talking to people about his ‘issues’ that now, having what might count as an ‘issue’, he almost felt inclined to talk about it voluntarily.

If only just to throw it in the shrink’s face.

He pictured typing out a response to the psychiatrist’s text. He didn’t get much further than ‘Laura’s dead’ before the potential ramifications had him dismissing the thought entirely. Telling his psychiatrist that his sister was dead would open up a can of worms that he really didn’t want to have to deal with.

He was having trouble with the worms he already had.

Derek stuck his dying phone into the pocket of his jacket. Out of sight, out of mind.

He’d charge the phone when he went to see Peter later. In the evening, when Jennifer would be around and there would therefore be no hourly interruptions by well-meaning nurses who were just doing their jobs.

They still had a lot to talk about.

Speaking of which…

Instincts prickling, Derek cocked his head to the side and listened carefully.

Barely audible through the walls and the trees, a sound that wasn’t natural to the surrounding woods.

He moved without thinking, stalking through the house and out the back door, into the trees that swallowed the edges of the back yard. The noise was unmistakable out there; footsteps crunching through the dry leaves, the shuffle of clothes, a pair of voices. They were too far off the trails to be hikers, not quiet enough to be hunters of either kind.

He almost stepped on the inhaler, too busy listening instead of paying attention to his feet.

Only a flash of white from the corner of his eye made him notice it.

And then he couldn’t help but notice where in the woods it was – in that place where he’d found the half of his sister that he’d been able to bury.

Strange. He hadn’t thought it was so close to the house. It had seemed so much further away when he’d been looking for her, and further even than that when he’d been carrying her back.

Derek picked up the inhaler, eyebrows angled into a frown.

Puzzle pieces slotted into place while the voices got closer, the smell of a newly turned wolf carried on the breeze. Peter had mentioned biting a teenager in the woods and now teenagers were stomping carelessly through the underbrush towards him. Ergo, one of them was his pack-brother… potentially. Best not count any chickens on that one. Not until he actually got a measure of the kid.

The timing was off, Derek thought as he waited for the teens to find him in the clearing, something about his uncle’s story not adding up.

Not that it mattered.

Technically speaking he’d already buried a body for his uncle.

His feelings on the matter were complicated. Like all his feelings when it came to Laura.

Still, the one thing that hadn’t changed was how he felt about Peter.

So Derek stood and waited, and when the two teens emerged from the trees he held up the inhaler. “This yours?”

The reactions from the two boys were telling. Instant suspicion emanated from them both in varying degrees, curiosity and awkward shuffling from the one with the shaved head while the newly minted wolf stared dumbly.

They knew this was where Laura’s body had been, then. Most likely the new wolf had found her here the night he’d been bitten. Faced with a stranger appearing in the same location as the body (now missing), suspicion was a logical reaction.

Derek’s scowl deepened slightly.

“You’re on private property,” he added.

“Sorry,” the non-wolf piped up, scrubbing a hand across the back of his neck in a gesture that was perfectly designed to telegraph sheepishness. “We, uh, didn’t know. We were just looking for, yeah, the inhaler my friend lost the other night when he was… trespassing?”

The new wolf shot his friend a look.

“What? He just said this is private property, ergo you were trespassing.”

“That is mine,” the new wolf confirmed, nodding at the inhaler. “I dropped it around here somewhere the other night.”

“When you were bitten?” Derek asked bluntly, not in the mood for pretending.

“Bitten…?” the new wolf repeated, transparently.

Derek rolled his eyes. “It wasn’t me. I know what did it. I can help you if you want,” he told the kid blandly, then tossed the inhaler and turned to walk away without bothering to wait and see if he caught it.

He was still well within earshot when the two teens started talking again, this time a hastily hissed conversation about wolves in California, disappearing bite marks, and the likelihood that things like werewolves actually existed.

Disappointed, Derek shook his head.

The kid was wolf enough by now that Derek had been able to identify him by scent, which meant he was wolf enough that he should have noticed his newly enhanced senses. It had been pretty obvious that he hadn't noticed Derek's approach, too absorbed in his own conversation to pay attention to the world around him. And now there he was, not even realising that Derek could hear him speculating about whether or not to listen to 'weirdo private property guy'.

It shouldn't have stung.

A lot of things shouldn't have stung, but they did.

Maybe he was too sensitive. Maybe it was because of everything else that was going on. With Laura and Peter and Peter's plan and sleeping in his old burned-out house and only having something like twenty dollars to his name after making it to Beacon Hills.

Thinking about money led Derek to thinking about food, a trail of thought which took him to the car and then to the closest dollar store for some cheap, crappy food that didn't require cooking in order to eat. Tins of baked beans with little sausages. A box of muesli bars that tasted kind of like chalk.

He needed to talk to Peter about money. Before it got to the point where breaking and entering started to sound like a good plan.

Actually, looking at the gauge for the gas tank, he needed to talk to Peter about money _tonight_ or he'd be going everywhere on foot within the next week.

Counting his remaining cash, Derek decided he had enough to put a little into the car.

Just a little. Enough to keep it going in case he needed a faster mode of transportation than his own two feet. Or in case he needed the trunk space. The camaro didn't sport a huge amount of space, but he was pretty sure he could fit a body in there if he needed to.

He didn't really want to find out, but if needs must...

God, he wished Laura had less expensive taste in cars.

The gas station on the southern edge of town was cheaper than the one closer to the town center, and conveniently positioned so that he could swing by on his way to the hospital without going too far out of his way.

It had a prepay option – cash at the counter or card at the meter – which meant he could be sure he didn't overspend. All it cost him was a flare of annoyance at the judgy look on the clerk's face when he put down ten dollars in change. Shoulders tight from the interaction, Derek squeezed the pump hard enough to leave an impression of the metal on his palm, the edges biting into his skin like fingernails.

Did it count as self-harm if it didn't leave a mark?

He didn't notice the big SUV until it was already at the next pump over.

At first he didn't give it much notice. Not until the driver's side door open and he caught a scent that had the hair on his arms prickling with unpleasant goosebumps.

Beneath the more common scents of clean sweat and cotton, clearly distinctive even past the gasoline smell of the pumps – gun oil and wolfsbane. A combination that only ever meant one thing. Especially when coupled with that military-straight posture and jacket big enough to hide weapons under.

Hunter.

He'd gone so long without seeing any, Derek could barely remember the last time he'd known he was looking at a _hunter_ and not just an idiot with an inferiority complex. New York had been too big to be noticed in, and Laura too focused on 'healing' to look for any others of their kind. She'd wanted them to live normal lives and had succeeded well enough that they might as well have been invisible. Just another pair of cogs in the machine.

_Stupid_ , he thought to himself, angry over being surprised.

He shouldn't _be_ surprised.

A death like Laura's – half a body found in the woods, in a place once known to support a pack – would bring them in anywhere.

Watching the man at the pump, Derek realised that he actually looked familiar even though he was sure he'd never seen him before. It was the eyes, he thought. The man had the same eyes as a substitute teacher Derek remembered from the months before his family were burned alive.

“Argent,” he said the word aloud almost involuntarily.

The man looked up, slightly surprised to find himself being addressed by someone he didn't know. He took a moment to look Derek over, and Derek knew what he'd be seeing – an angry-looking young man with dark hair and a distinctive face.

“Hale,” the man returned after looking at him a moment, voice and expression guarded. “I suppose you're here for the same reason I am,” the man added, infuriatingly calm despite having been surprised.

“Getting gas?” Derek asked drily. “Sure.”

The hunter didn't falter, simply eyeing him for a moment before purposefully turning his back and heading to the gas pump. “I have to say I didn't picture myself in Beacon Hills again. It's a nice town. Small, homely, the kind of place a man might like to raise a family. It is a shame about those animal attacks though...”

“There's been more than one?” Derek asked mildly, the bones in his hands creaking with how tightly he had them clenched.

“You didn't know about the others?” Argent raised his eyebrows slightly, affecting a thoughtful air. “I suppose not. They haven't been reported officially as attacks, I doubt anyone outside fish and game have heard about it. Deer,” the hunter clarified after a moment, clearly watching Derek's face for any signs of recognition, “carved with spirals in their sides. I have a friend who's a park ranger, says it's likely kids.”

“Gotta watch out for those kids.”

“What I mean to say is, so far there's only been one attack of note but there's been some activity leading up to it that makes me wonder if we're really looking at a wild animal here.” A beat. Argent's pump gave the beep that let him know the tank was full.

“What else would it be?” Derek asked, years of therapy doing nothing to mask the sarcasm. He decided it was probably best to bow out before he said anything truly regretful and opened the car door to get inside.

Inside the gas station the clerk was glaring daggers.

“What else indeed?” Argent asked mildly. He nodded to Derek. “You take care.”

“Sure,” Derek replied as he got into his car. “Don't burn any houses.”

-

“There's cash in the vault, duckling,” Peter said when Derek brought up his money situation. “Heirlooms, books and other things too dangerous to keep in a house with children. I'd try the safes,” he continued, idly stroking the fingers of his good hand through Derek's hair, “I know there's one full of bearer bonds and another with a stash of hundreds and great-grandmother's good pearls.”

“I don't know the combinations,” Derek confessed, eyes closed and leaning into his uncle's touch.

They were on the bed, both of them squeezed onto the tiny hospital-sized single with Derek mostly on top of Peter, his head cushioned on the older man's chest right above his heart. Jennifer was on duty or they wouldn't have dared – she wouldn't tell Derek off for squashing the patient or raise a fuss if she walked in and saw Peter awake and talking.

“I know two of them,” Peter replied easily. “The third's the one your mother kept the very dangerous things in. She never did tell me what was in there... your father's bones, maybe.”

Derek snorted.

“Take whatever you like,” Peter added a moment later. “It's all ours now anyway. Yours more than mine. I still have my money, my share of mother's inheritance all safe and accruing interest in the bank. Yours.... Laura really fucked you with that one didn't she?”

“I can't access it without her permission,” Derek said darkly.

It had been a point of contention when she was alive, the whole guardianship thing and what it had done to his freedom and his ability to function as an adult. Now that she was dead his financial situation was even worse. He couldn't exactly ask her grave for pocket money.

“Alphas. Always think they know best, don't they? You will tell me if I make any truly terrible choices won't you? Not counting all the murder.”

_Not counting all the murder. Right._ Derek rolled his eyes.

He still wasn't a hundred percent sure how he felt about that part.

“You bit an idiot,” he said instead of voicing his doubts about premeditated homicide.

Peter made a face, scars dragging at the corner of his mouth. “I did tell you he was a mistake.”

“Well he's a mistake we have to account for. What do you we even know about him anyway? He used to be asthmatic,” Derek ticked off the points using his fingers, “he's got a smartass friend...”

That was two. Derek held up two fingers pointedly.

Peter added his own pointer finger. “He's in high school. Beacon Hills High,” he gave a half-shrug, an odd gesture in a man lying down. “He wouldn't have been in the preserve at night if he weren't in the Beacon High catchment – the next-closest high school is too far for an impulse trip to the woods.”

“Great. So we've got a bitten teenager running around Beacon High and a full moon coming up soon.”

“Maybe you should keep an eye on him...”

Derek propped himself up a bit so he could look down at his uncle with as dry a stare as he could manage.

Peter smiled at him in return, fondness radiating from his eyes. “You really did grow into your eyebrows, love. That stare of yours is formidable.”

“I'm not babysitting a dickhead bitten wolf through his first full moon,” Derek said flatly, ignoring the compliment. (He thought it was a compliment.)

“Well I can't,” Peter pointed out with a dark little chuckle. “I'm sure it'll go down really well if I just walk up to the kid and introduce myself. 'Hello, I'm Peter, I bit you in the woods the other night. Don't worry, it was an accident' – it'd be a miracle if he didn't call the police. You at least are somewhat closer to the boy's age. Besides which, I have plans this full moon.”

“I'm _not_ babysitting,” Derek repeated. “I'm pretty sure he thinks I killed Laura. He's not going to trust anything I say.”

“And you think he'd trust anything _I_ say?” Peter gestured to himself with his bad hand, indicating his entire right side.

Derek considered. He might not have any issue with the way his uncle looked – to him Peter was just Peter, the person he loved the most in the world – but he still realised that most people would find his scars confronting. If not outright alarming. (Most people didn't see scars like that every day, or care to see the strength in them from having survived something so horrific.) Being approached by a stranger was daunting enough without the startling aspect of the scars.

Add to that the fact that Peter was significantly older than the teen. A strange adult in his thirties approaching a teenage boy was not going to go down well no matter what the circumstances were.

On the other hand, Derek was young enough that his talking to a teenager wasn't _that_ weird.

Or it wouldn't be, if said teenager didn't already find him suspicious. And if Derek were at all good with people and not a ticking time bomb of anger and social anxiety.

Stalemate.

“Fuck,” Derek ground out from between his teeth. He sighed and shifted so that his head was resting on Peter's chest again. “ _Fine_. I'll babysit the new wolf. But you owe me, old man.”

“I owe you so much, duckling. And when I can get out of here, I'll make it all up to you.” Lips pressed against the top of Derek's head. “I promise.”


	4. Chapter Four - Irrational or Impulsive Behaviour

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Derek reluctantly babysits.

Dr Zellek had once suggested that Derek might be more comfortable forming friendships with people younger than himself, theorising that he'd find them less threatening than people his own age. And because he was of the opinion that Derek's mental maturity may have stalled somewhat due to the trauma he'd been through, effectively leaving him an angry sixteen year old in the body of a young adult.

His testimony had been a contributing factor to Laura's control of his finances.

Interestingly, she'd never pushed him to follow through on Zellek's recommendation of befriending teenagers. Possibly because she didn't want to risk undermining the point of his therapy by focusing on his social skills. Possibly because she knew exactly what he looked like and didn't want a bunch of teenage girls trying to date him in order to freak out their parents.

Derek stood at the edge of the woods where they butted up against the lacrosse field and Beacon Hills High, arms crossed, feet planted. Perfectly balanced between bored out of his brains and simmering with low-level anger.

He was watching the team go through their practice drills, ears open and eyes focused on one boy in particular.

The breeze was blowing perpendicular to the field, muffling he sounds before they could reach him. There was a lot of talk to sift through, different conversations going on at different points of the field between drills and shouts from the coach.

Still, Derek didn't need to be able to hear everything to know what was going on.

He could see it all unfold plain as day and had to clench his jaw to stifle a growl.

Scott – the new wolf, who's name he'd heard only a few minutes ago – was doing everything a newly turned werewolf should not be doing. He was involving himself in a sport (a team sport) that required speed, focus, and contact. An adrenaline trigger to the shift, which he was clearly figuring out right there on the field in front of the rest of the team. Just casually exposing all his little friends to the reality of the supernatural, practically begging Argent and his buddies to storm in and put him down.

His instincts told him to intervene, but he stayed put.

Some stranger barrelling in from the sidelines would only add pressure to an already volatile situation. So far the kid hadn't actually attacked anyone. Another wolf coming into the picture could change that.

Fifty-fifty, Derek might be able to get him out of there before anything happened or he might get mauled in front of a bunch of high school kids.

Best not to risk it.

Scott seemed to figure out that it wasn't a good idea to stay where he was and rushed himself off the field, leaving his friend behind to do damage control. Derek ignored the friend and cut sideways through the woods to follow Scott and make sure he didn't actually hurt anyone, taking the long way around to avoid being spotted. He lost sight of the kid pretty quickly, but used his nose to track him to the locker rooms.

_Points for isolation_ , Derek thought as he slipped inside and stalked past the benches and rows of lockers. But he lost more for the enclosed space.

He found the kid holed up in a corner, half way to a proper beta shift and looking feral with it, but hung back for the same reasons as before. In this state Scott would likely see the appearance of another wolf as a threat. Then he'd have a fight on his hands (one-sided, but still annoying) and it'd be practically impossible to get the kid calmed down before lacrosse practice ended and the rest of the team arrived.

The pungent odours of unwashed gym clothes and freshly bleached tiles masked Derek's scent. He watched, feeling like a creeper, as Scott slowly calmed down. At least enough that when his friend arrived he didn't immediately murder the other boy.

Maybe he should've intervened then, but in all honesty the kid needed a reality check.

Both of them did.

Scott needed to _know_ how dangerous it was to go around without any means of control, and his friend needed to know that Scott was dangerous. Full stop.

It was one thing to be told, but it wouldn't sink in unless they actually experienced it.

Now they'd experienced it, maybe Scott would be a bit more amenable to actually listening.

_Right._

-

* * *

-

“You could've killed someone today.”

That statement was made, no-nonsense and bland, from just inside Scott McCall's window.

The teenager jumped, proving once again that he was completely oblivious to the capabilities of his new senses. He whirled around, looking shocked and angry to see Derek standing there in his room as if he had any right to be there.

“What would you know?” he demanded. And then, even more demanding; “What are you doing in my room? Are you _stalking_ me?”

“Yes,” Derek replied, arms crossed over his chest. He saw no need to mince words with someone who'd already decided they didn't like him. “I had to. You need help and you're not going to get it on your own.”

“I don't need help,” Scott insisted, his heightened pulse saying otherwise. “And if I did,” he added, not so subtly edging towards a baseball bat propped up near his desk, “I wouldn't want it from _you_.”

“Doesn't change the fact that you need it.” Derek let that sink in a moment while Scott floundered for something else to say. “You could've killed your friend today. I saw you on the pitch. You nearly shifted in front of everyone. You could've killed someone there too.”

“You were watching us,” Scott stated, eyes narrowed and voice filled with disgust. “You were watching me. That's – who the hell do you think you are? I'm calling –”

“The cops?” Derek finished with him, eyebrows raised slightly. “What do you think they're going to do? What's going to happen when they get here and you attack them? You're already getting angry. You'll turn, and you'll attack anyone who gets close enough. You need to calm down.” Derek paused a beat, not unaware of the irony in his telling someone to calm down. “Strong emotions trigger the shift. You can't control it yet, you can't control yourself.”

“Right, and I bet you can teach me how?” Scott did not sound impressed or convinced, though at least he wasn't reaching for his phone (or the bat) anymore. “I don't want your help,” he repeated pointedly. “You probably can't control yourself either – you killed that girl in the woods, did she piss you off or was she just in the wrong place at the wrong time?”

Derek couldn't help the growl that escaped. Short, quickly choked off, but a growl just the same.

Scott's eyes went wide again, the teen realising that maybe it wasn't the best idea to accuse someone of murder when they were right in front of you.

“I didn't kill her,” Derek ground out.

“Yeah?” Scott's chin tilted stubbornly upwards. “Then who did?”

_My uncle. The alpha, the one who bit you._

It was there on the tip of his tongue. Derek nearly said it, lips pressed together to form the first syllable before he thought better of it. “Hunters did,” he said instead. “They cut us in half so they can make sure we're dead.”

That shut him up. For all of two seconds.

“Hunters as in werewolf hunters?” Scott asked, finally starting to look like the reality of his situation was sinking in. Or at least like he was maybe willing to actually listen. “That's a thing?”

“There's some in town,” Derek confirmed. “And there's going to be more. They're supposed to follow a code but they don't. If they know about you, they're going to try and kill you.”

“And they killed that girl? Why? What did she do?”

A complicated question.

Derek thought about it for a moment, letting the silence stretch on as he tried to figure out what to say. Laura hadn't _done_ anything... except all of the things that she had done. Normal things, complicated things, that normal humans did all the time. She'd pushed her brother into therapy, judged him, refused to listen and argued every point he tried to make. She'd abandoned a family member into long term inpatient care and never checked in, never visited. She'd hated Peter for something she didn't understand and blamed him for things that were out of his control.

She'd had an ill-advised friendship with a substitute teacher.

She'd tried to do what she thought was the right thing, only it hadn't worked out that way.

“...She survived,” Derek settled on finally.

“Okay. So... what am I supposed to do?”

“You need to find a way to control yourself. I can help with that.”

He _thought_ he could, anyway. He hadn't been close to another werewolf other than Laura in six years, and the bitten wolves he remembered from before that had taken the bite when he was too young to remember much about it.

Still, Derek had had his own issues with controlling his inner wolf. He knew what had helped him, and what had only made things harder. He could only assume that whatever Scott had going on in his life it wasn't any worse than what he'd gone through at that age.

“You also need to keep a low profile,” Derek added. “I can't help you if you go around announcing to everyone that you're a werewolf. You do that and you might as well paint a target on your forehead.”

Scott gave him a scathing look, one that might have held more weight if it wasn't coming from a sixteen year old with floppy hair and a too-honest face. “I'm not going to go around telling everyone. Stiles knows, but he's the _only_ one who knows and I'm going to keep it that way. I'm not stupid, you know.”

“Great. So you wont have any problems keeping your temper tomorrow. Day before the full moon,” Derek explained drily, “you're going to start to feel it's pull. You'll be impulsive. You'll get angry quicker. Things that are only a little annoying on a good day are going to make you want to pull your hair out. Stay home from school if you can, because being around people is going to make it worse. Then, on the full moon, you need to come over to my place – the Hale house – so we can make sure you don't go off on a rampage and kill any of your friends or family. If you come over before its dark we should be safe. The moon's pull gets worse when the sun goes down.”

“Wait, what?” Scott blinked at him, that air of suspicion coming up again as what Derek had said started to sink in. “You want me to come hang out with you at an abandoned house on Friday?”

“So you don't kill anyone,” Derek stressed.

“There's a party on Friday,” Scott continued, seemingly having missed the whole 'so you don't kill anyone' thing.

“Christ.” Derek rolled his eyes. He looked up at the ceiling and counted to two, which was as close to ten as he managed to get before turning away and moving towards the window again. “Fine. You want to eat your friends, go to the party. You want to learn control, come to the house.”

Derek left through the window before Scott could reply, and was away over the back fence a half-second later.

Rude, to leave on a note like that, but he'd had to get away before he said something regrettable... Like calling the kid a moron or threatening to come back with chains. He'd come back on Friday if Scott didn't show, drag him away from that party if he had to, and babysit him whether he liked it or not.

They couldn't afford to have Scott running around town feral and murderous like some sort of B-movie monster.

The stakes were way too high for that.

-

* * *

-

As predicted, on Friday Scott was a no-show.

Derek waited as long as he reasonably could – not very long, considering when the moon was due to rise – before uttering a short groan of annoyance and leaving the cold, empty ruins of his family home to track him down.

The party was easy to find. All he had to do was roam around a bit until the sound of music and voices led him to the right place. A mcmansion in the better part of town where houses were far enough apart that their noise wouldn't disturb the neighbours enough to call the cops. Artfully sculpted hedges ringed the property, adding an illusion of privacy for the teens and young adults that clustered in small groups outside the house.

Derek remembered parties like these, though he hadn't been to any in a very long time. None since the fire.

He hung back on the other side of the hedge, out of sight but with a full view of the back yard where most of the bodies were.

The noise made him bristle. The smell made him want to gag. He could see bottles being passed around and red solo cups being filled from a keg on the back porch. By the end of the night there would be plenty of drunk teens trying to hide it from mommy and daddy. Sick on the lawn, girls crying in the bathroom.

Derek stuck a hand into his jacket pocket and fingered his phone.

He could go in. Could track down Scott that way and risk making a scene when the kid didn't want to leave.

Or he could make a scene, and swoop in during the chaos when nobody was likely to notice. Underage drinking was enough of a something to get a deputy or two to come out and break up the party.

He was just about to dial when a scrap of conversation caught his attention and stopped him.

“...Scott?” a girl asked.

“I don't know,” another girl replied, a little too flippant to sound like she actually cared. “Maybe he's late. Did he actually say when he was going to meet you?”

“No...” the first girl said, sounding unsure. “He said he'd meet me here, but I guess we didn't set a time. Maybe I should text him.”

“Allison...”

Derek tuned out of the conversation, slipping his phone back into his jacket. He turned his back to the thumping babble of the party and instead jogged back to his car. A gamble, to assume that Scott had decided that staying home was the lesser of two evils, but it made sense. In a teenage-logic kind of way. He probably thought he could lock himself in his room and he'd be fine. Nevermind the evidence to the contrary.

He got there in time to see the kid jump out the window in full beta shift, the glint of broken handcuffs still on his wrists telling Derek exactly how the kid had thought he was going to ride out the full moon.

“Idiot,” Derek muttered uncharitably, too annoyed to remember what he himself had been like at Scott's age.

He got out of the car and followed, herding the beta through backyards and across streets until they reached the edge of the preserve. Once hidden by the trees he could back off a bit and let the other wolf roam around chasing squirrels and pissing on trees, only keeping him from going back out into civilisation if necessary. Until then Derek had to hope that nobody looked out their widow at an inopportune time.

Frenzied and wild, Scott's beta self ran out of steam somewhere close to two in the morning and found a nice little clearing to collapse in.

Classic wolfman mythos, Derek observed drily, and sat himself down just outside scent range to wait for the teen to wake up again.

He was so going to give Peter shit again for biting this kid.

At around five in the morning, getting close to proper dawn, Derek snapped awake. Up on his feet before he'd registered what had shaken him out of his doze, it took him a second to pinpoint where the noise was coming from. Footsteps stumbling and crunching through the undergrowth, interspersed with the occasional holler of 'Scott!' and muttered curses and commentary.

Derek glanced at the still-sleeping beta in the clearing.

Scott had leaves in his hair, sap under his fingernails, and dirt all over his clothes. There was a smear of rust-brown on his chin, and a few drops of blood on his shirt. Let him worry about it if he didn't remember, Derek thought to himself as he left. It'd serve him right for not listening.

He found Scott's friend less than five minutes away, miraculously headed the right direction to find the erstwhile wolf.

“He's sleeping,” Derek told him bluntly as he emerged from the trees.

The kid jumped, clearly not having seen or heard his approach, and yelped out a curse. “Jeez! Wear a bell or something, man! It can't be healthy for a heart to do what my heart just did right now and I swear if you gave me a heart attack with your whole appearing from nowhere thing then you're the one who's going to be paying my medical bills.” Stiles finished his rant and narrowed his eyes suspiciously, eyeing Derek in a way that had him wondering exactly what Scott might have said about him. “What are you doing out here?”

“Keeping your friend from going on a rampage through town,” Derek replied flatly, feeling gratified when Stiles blanched.

“He didn't...?” Stiles trailed off, as though he didn't really want to ask the question at all.

Derek decided not to reassure him. Both teenagers could do with a bit of a reality check if they thought handcuffs were a good idea to keep a werewolf in check. “So the handcuffs,” he said instead, “were they your idea or his?”

There was a beat of silence. Stiles blinked first. “To be fair,” he said, somehow managing to sound both sheepish _and_ accusatory, “I had chains too. I had a whole plan. Except Scott still wanted to go to Lydia's party, so I sort of had to handcuff him to the radiator instead.”

Derek pinched the bridge of his nose. “I really don't need this,” he muttered aloud.

“Hey, it's not like he asked for this! Neither did I, by the way, and yet here I am.” The last part was muttered, somewhat disgustedly.

“Great,” Derek deadpanned, irritation making his shoulders tight, “that makes it all better. Just... just try to keep him from doing anything else stupid. Oh,” Derek added, “and I wasn't on him the whole night, so if he throws up fur and bones you can tell him it's his own damn fault.”

He left before Stiles could formulate much of a reply. He still had to pick up the car.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know there's probably a lot less Peter in this fic than people would like, but it's the nature of writing this part of the timeline from Derek's POV. Circumstances have aligned so that he can't be where he wants to be and instead has to do cannon-ish things if he wants a happy ending.
> 
> I promise there's Derek/Peter interaction in the next chapter.


	5. Chapter Five - Communication and Active Listening

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Derek experiences a series of uncomfortable conversations.

Derek sat in the driver's seat of the car, staring out the windshield at the house as he tried to figure out the easiest way to get himself clean without needing to resort to washing in the creek again.

His phone, now at half-battery after having been dead for a few days, vibrated with a text.

_Derek, I've been unable to get hold of you or your sister for several days now. Please text me to let me know that you're ok, otherwise I'll have to organise a wellness check with police or social services. Just a yes or no, that's all I'm asking for. Dr McCaffery._

Several missed calls registered on the log, as well as two voicemail notifications from Dr McCaffery's office. Derek stared resentfully at the screen, regretting that he'd decided to charge his phone at all. He'd only done it in case Peter needed to get hold of him in a hurry, either with Jennifer's phone or one in the hospital.

It hadn't occurred to him that Dr McCaffery might still be trying to track him down over that missed appointment. He honestly hadn't given it a second thought since that first text, assuming that a psychiatrist in New York would have too many patients to care about it if one decided not to show. He pretty much assumed that when a therapist claimed to care about him they meant it in the academic sense. That they cared about him because he was a mildly interesting case and those were rare in commercial psychiatry.

So either academic caring extended further than he'd thought or McCaffery was one of those rare people who actually took a personal interest in their patients' well-being. Regardless of whether they'd only had one appointment with her or not.

Either way, a wellness check was right up there on the list of 'Things Derek Didn't Need Right Now'.

Police would knock on the door a couple of times, then they'd get the super to let them in. Legal, because wellness checks were meant to make sure nobody had fallen over and broken a hip in the bathroom and sometimes involved finding people who'd been dead for more than a week after dying in their sleep.

The apartment would be empty, no signs that anything sinister had happened. If they bothered combing through the trash they might find Laura's note, but what could that possibly lead to? Checking on the car, which was gone. But that didn't necessarily _mean_ anything.

It might get left there, with the empty apartment and the car gone from the garage. Resources being what they were, 'possibly missing' wasn't good enough for an investigation. They might be on holiday for all anyone knew.

Except for that whole thing where Derek wasn't considered capable of looking after himself and wasn't checking in with his psychiatrist after having been left alone by his sister.

Derek sighed heavily. Y-E-S, he typed the response with angry jabs against the screen, and sent it with a stab of his thumb.

Almost immediately the phone started to vibrate with an incoming call.

Derek moved to decline the call, then paused with his thumb hovering over the red circle. He'd taken the bait, he realised. He'd proven that he was alive but he hadn't proven that he was _well_. The police check wouldn't be off the table at all, and McCaffery was just going to keep calling.

With a low growl, Derek instead hit the green circle and brought the phone to his ear.

“I'm alive,” he answered bluntly. “What do you want?”

“Derek,” Dr Marlena McCaffery said, her voice exactly the same as he recalled from their one session together. Warm and professional, without much to tell you what she might be feeling. “I'm glad you answered. You missed your session last week and I was worried. I've been trying to get hold of your sister, but I haven't had any luck. Is she there with you now?”

“No,” Derek stated, the repeated firmly; “What do you want?”

“I want to make sure you're ok. Our first session together was... contentious, for a first time. You didn't say much, to tell the truth, but what you did say gave me cause to be concerned when you didn't show up for your appointment. I –”

“I'm ok,” Derek interrupted flatly (though he'd been suspecting for a while that he really wasn't). He heard Marlena sigh – a soft, small sound that he was sure he hadn't been meant to hear. A sound he wouldn't have heard if he were human.

“Alright,” she said after a beat. “I just want to be sure that you're safe. You are safe, aren't you? You're not in a place that would put you in any danger?”

A half-laugh burst out before Derek could stop it, clamping his lips together tight and clenching his jaw. He took a long breath through his nostrils and didn't bother to count to ten because he knew it wouldn't help.

“Should I take that as a no?” Marlena asked mildly.

“Why do you care?”

“Derek,” there was a pause. Another sigh, and then Marlena's warm, professional tone cracked into something a bit more human. “You told me your sister financially abuses you to get you to go to therapy. When you didn't show, I had to assume it was either because she decided you didn't need to or because something happened that made the alternative more appealing. Given the duration of your therapy and the additional legal rights your sister has over you, I can't imagine she would let you stop going. I was worried.”

“You don't even know me,” Derek pointed out, not sure how to feel about what the psychiatrist had just said.

His throat felt strangely tight. It occurred to him that this was maybe the first time one of his therapists had actually _listened_ to what he said when he talked about his sister.

Dr Kepler had always listened to Laura over him. Zellek had seemed to think that his feelings of hostility towards her were a redirection of his frustration with himself – an easier target than admitting that he wasn't properly equipped to deal with the real world.

And now Dr McCaffery was saying 'financial abuse' like she'd never doubted that he was telling the truth.

“One human being to another,” Marlena replied, which snapped Derek back out of his head and into the present. “Just tell me this, please. Are you going to be ok, or do you need me to get you some help? There's no shame in needing help, and nothing wrong with you if you admit it.”

“You can't help me,” Derek told her honestly, as honestly as he could ever be with someone who thought that werewolves and hunters were a delusion.

“I can give you resources,” Marlena insisted, “at least let me give you the names of some shelters...”

“I'm not _homeless_ –“ Derek stopped, because technically he _was_ homeless. He'd even been thinking about it before, about whether he should bother trying to find somewhere to shower or if he should just wash in the creek. He was sleeping in a place without running water or electricity, a place that was missing half of its walls and a good portion of its roof. He had money now, after raiding the vault, but he wasn't using it to put a roof over his head.

Maybe he should. Maybe he should check into a motel. That would solve his running water problem anyway.

Derek hesitated. He ran a hand over his face, then slumped back against the car seat. “I'm... fuck it, I'm not even in New York.”

“But you're safe?”

“No.”

“You're not safe?”

For a moment Derek considered telling her the truth, like he'd told the truth to other therapists who'd assumed he was experiencing delusions or using fantasies to help him cope with trauma. Then that odd tight-throated feeling came over him again and he wondered whether she might actually _believe_ him – at least the parts about his uncle and getting revenge.

“I'm as safe as I'd be anywhere,” he settled on finally, and hung up on her. He switched his phone off then and tossed it onto the passenger seat.

If he showed up after Jennifer's shift started he could shower at the hospital and she'd make sure nobody walked in. He'd look into getting himself a motel room tomorrow.

* * *

“One down,” Peter said with obvious satisfaction, his smile made lopsided by his scars. “I think I'll work my way up,” he continued, moving slowly but surely as he made himself a cup of tea using the electric kettle Jennifer had left the other night.

Derek sat on the bed watching him, boots off, jacket draped over the nearby visitor's chair. He thought the other wolf looked stronger, more capable than he had even the night before, and wondered if it had anything to do with his being there.

“Insurance agent,” Peter continued, head slightly cocked as he counted off his list, “the driver, the arsonists, the chemistry teacher, and then Ms Argent herself. What do you think?”

“You've got the chemistry teacher after the guys who lit the fire,” Derek pointed out with a frown.

“Without the accelerant we might have been able to find a way to break the ash lines,” Peter replied easily, waving a hand through the air for emphasis. “Abigail might have survived long enough to do it for us. She died first, you know. Cut off from the rest of us. Camille tried to shield her of course, but humans succumb to smoke inhalation much faster than we do.”

The thought of his baby cousin (second cousin? Derek had never been too clear on their actual relation to the other branch of the Hales) sparked a flare of grief/anger that washed over him like a wave of heat. There and gone in an instant, leaving behind the faint sting of a burn. They hadn't been close – the gap in interests between teenager and single-digit preteen too big for that – but she'd been family.

“But you're right,” Peter added, turning back to face Derek. “Perhaps he doesn't deserve _death_ for trying to impress a coworker in a bar. I might just maim him instead. That seems reasonable.”

Derek snorted, dark amusement making him smile despite himself because that was something his uncle would have said before the fire too. Only then he wouldn't have actually meant it. Or maybe he would have meant it, but he definitely wouldn't have done it.

“I babysat,” Derek said instead of voicing his other thoughts.

“I noticed,” Peter smiled at him. He crossed the room with slow, measured steps and sat down on the bed beside his nephew, close enough that their sides were touching and Derek was forced (' _forced_ ', he rolled his eyes) to put an arm around him to be comfortable.

“The kid's a moron,” Derek told the other wolf flatly, and uncharitably. “He wanted to go to a party. His friend had to handcuff him to a radiator. I had to herd him to the woods when he broke out. He ate squirrels.”

Peter didn't even bother to look remorseful. “We've all eaten a squirrel at some point,” he said mildly.

Derek gave him a dry look.

“Some of us have eaten squirrels,” Peter corrected himself. He leaned in closer, tea held away from them both so it didn't risk spilling, and kissed the corner of Derek's mouth. “Will you babysit again this weekend?”

“It's not a full moon.”

“I'm stronger with you here. I'm sure you've noticed.” Peter kissed him again, an easy and welcome distraction, scarred fingers resting lightly against Derek's thigh. “I won't need the full moon. Unless you want to come with me...”

_Tempting_.

Though now that it was being offered as a real probability something in him still hesitated at the idea of premeditated murder. It would be different, he thought, if he were fighting someone or killing in self defence. The idea wasn't _repulsive_ – he didn't have any reservations about these people dying – it just... wasn't him. Not really.

He was sure he could hurt them. _Easily_ , he could hurt them. He just wasn't sure he'd be able to kill.

Derek opened his mouth to say so, but stopped, not sure how to articulate what he was thinking. He floundered a moment and shook his head, eyebrows drawn together in an expression that had nothing to do with anger.

“No,” Peter said for him finally, not the least bit surprised or disappointed. “It's not for you is it, duckling? That's alright. Leave the nasty bits to me. I can do the killing for both of us.”

He probably shouldn't find that romantic.

“Why haven't we had sex yet?”

As soon as the question was out, Derek snapped his mouth shut and wished he could take it back. It wasn't a question he'd intended to ask – not a subject he'd meant to bring up at all, but there it was. Hanging in the air, unable to be taken back. The comfortable silence that had begun had turned strange, and Peter's hand had frozen where before he'd been tracing idle patterns against Derek's forearm.

The silence ticked on.

Derek swallowed, building up the courage to take it back. The position they were in – sitting together on the tiny hospital bed, Derek's arm wrapped around his uncle's shoulders – meant he could avoid looking at Peter's face. He didn't want to look, to see how the older man was reacting past the way he seemed to have tensed.

Derek opened his mouth, but just as he was about to speak Peter beat him to the punch.

“Because I don't want to.”

Five words and Derek felt like all the breath had been knocked out of him. “Oh.”

“No,” Peter said firmly, his hand suddenly gripping tight around Derek's arm. He shifted, out from under Derek's arm, turning so he was facing the younger man properly. “I don't mean it that way. Not the way you're thinking now. You can't possibly think I meant it's because I don't want you,” he continued, softer and more vulnerable. “I do. I want you. More than can possibly explain in words.”

“But,” Derek said, because he knew there was a 'but' coming.

“But not like this.” Peter moved then, getting up off the bed entirely. He stood where Derek could see him, bare foot and hair uncombed, dressed in nothing but a hospital gown because today had been 'bathing day' and it was easier to dress a catatonic grown man in an open-backed gown than in proper clothes when there were other, needier patients to get to.

“Not here,” Peter continued, gesturing to the room around them, “in this place. Not in that bed. And not like _this_.” A sweeping gesture to his bad side, his scarred right hand held up for emphasis. The fingers on that hand uncurled, scar tissue stretching tight across the palm.

Startled, Derek realised he didn't even see the scars anymore. He forgot how much it frustrated the other wolf to have to actively stop them from healing in order to keep his cover.

“Oh,” Derek said again, this time understanding.

“Yes. I want to be able to feel you with both hands. I could forgive fucking in a hospital room,” Peter said, looming over Derek with an intense look in his bright blue eyes, “but I can't forgive the idea of this.”

He reached out to cup Derek's face with his bad hand. The scar tissue felt strange against Derek's skin, waxy and thick in a way that skin shouldn't be. He turned his face and kissed Peter's wrist anyway, though he knew his uncle could barely feel it. Nerve damage, the scarring not nearly as sensitive as normal skin.

Still, Peter's response to the kiss was predictable. Between one heartbeat and the next he was on the bed again, pinning Derek down against the mattress and kissing him breathless. The first kiss was fiery, aggressive and full of passion. The ones after that were purposefully less so, progressively gentler and softer, taking the mood down to something that wouldn't leave the both of them aching with physical need that neither would do anything about.

Finally Peter ended the kisses with a gentle brush of his lips against the tip of his nephew's nose.

He arranged himself on the bed again, prodding and poking until they were both curled up together on the tiny single bed, his head cushioned on Derek's shoulder and his back exposed to the room. A position of vulnerability in the human sense, since the hospital gown quite literally exposed him.

“Do you remember those plans we used to have?” Derek asked, the question this time much less charged and far more nostalgic. “We were going to get a hotel room on my sixteenth birthday, go to Spain over the summer holidays... Mom kept talking about having a wedding when I turned eighteen.”

“She was oddly insistent about that,” Peter chuckled. “I'm sorry it didn't turn out that way,” he said softly. “The fire took so much from us.”

“I would've liked it,” Derek mused quietly, “if you'd been the one I lost my virginity with.”

Peter was silent a moment, clearly digesting that statement and its implications. “Was it at least good?”

“No,” Derek snorted softly, able to see the humour in it only because it had been so long. “I didn't really enjoy it. It was consensual,” he clarified at Peter's questioning sound, “but it still sucked. I didn't know what I was doing and neither did she. I think we only hooked up because she wanted to piss off her parents and I knew Laura wouldn't approve. We met in therapy,” Derek rolled his eyes, “group for childhood trauma victims.”

“I'm sure it was very romantic,” Peter sounded amused.

“And how'd you meet Marissa again?”

“Marissa wasn't my first, duckling. I also didn't care if she thought I was romantic or not.”

“Marissa's the only one I know the name of,” Derek replied with a shrug.

“My romance is reserved entirely for you,” Peter informed him carelessly. “So you've had sex with a woman,” he continued after a moment, “at least once. Any men in your life?”

“Not 'in my life'. I never actually dated anyone, you know. I never wanted to date.”

“Nothing wrong with that.”

“I did... try it,” Derek confessed. “Dating. I fucking hated it. It wasn't you, so I hated it. I hated that Laura thought it meant I was getting over you, getting better. _Healing_. As if I had anything to heal from except losing you.”

And the death of his entire family. And everything that happened afterwards. But they weren't talking about that.

“Marissa was the only person I ever dated,” Peter replied, an easy confession said without hesitation. “I didn't date in highschool – half my peers thought I was a gay weirdo and the other half thought I was a violent psychopath. Once I came back after college I was far too gone on my very underage nephew to even think of dating someone my own age. Dating required effort. Fucking only required a pulse.”

Derek grinned, any jealousy he might have felt back when he was a teenager buried under years of grief and the knowledge that now Peter was his alone and always would be. “You sound like such a slut.”

“Oh, I was. But only because I couldn't have you. See?” Peter said teasingly, an obvious grin in his voice, “all of this romance just for you.”

* * *

After checking into the motel, Derek hadn't been spending much time at the house. There hadn't been a need to. He didn't need to use the structure for shelter, so he let it go back to being what it used to be – empty. A monument to things past. A mausoleum.

His sister's grave.

In other words, a place he didn't have much cause to return to.

So it was very much a surprise to find Scott and Stiles waiting for him there, one of the teens anxiously pacing back and forth in front of the porch while the other sat sullenly on the blackened steps. Derek slowed the camaro to a stop in what used to be the driveway. He parked the car, feeling two sets of eyes on him through the windshield. He had to force his hands to unclench from around the wheel, an impending sense of 'what now' already sparking his temper.

He got out of the car slowly, shut the door with a decisive slam, and asked flatly; “What are you doing here?”

Scott stood up, dusting off his jeans. “We need to talk,” he said seriously, earnest worry hiding underneath. “We figured this was the best place to find you.”

“We've been waiting here since noon, by the way,” Stiles added, hands deep in his jacket pockets. “At this creepy burned-out house which happens to be the only location that we know of that you might happen to be at any given time. Except when you're out in the woods or sneaking into people's bedrooms. Which – I feel like we need to talk about boundaries at some point. Maybe after talking about why you don't have running water or a phone.”

“I have a phone,” Derek said with a glare, responding to the least insulting part.

“You didn't give me your number or I would have called,” Scott told him, both his face and his heartbeat confirming that it was the honest truth.

Derek supposed he couldn't fault him on that. Not that he was exactly thrilled with the idea of giving the kid his phone number – he wasn't thrilled with the idea of anyone except Peter being able to reach him so easily. He thought about it as he crossed the driveway towards the house, considering the pros and cons of Scott being able to contact him.

It would make the babysitting aspect easier. Next time Scott had to be handcuffed to a radiator or chased away from suburbia it might be nice to get a heads up and not rely on luck and tracking skills.

“Fine,” he said, brushing past Scott to walk up the stairs and into the house, “Stiles can have my number.”

“Why Stiles?” Scott asked at the same time as Stiles said; “Me!? Wh– no.”

Derek ignored them and moved through into the gutted-out living room where he'd forgotten his other shirt. He hadn't noticed until he'd gone to round up his clothes for a trip to the laundromat. He'd thought about just buying a replacement, but that would mean actually going shopping and he wasn't in the mood to deal with all that entailed. Fake-cheery assistants, the stares of fellow shoppers, maybe even a bold person or two trying to talk to him. It wasn't worth it for just a shirt.

He grabbed the shirt from the floor, then turned to look at the two teens who'd followed him inside.

_Like ducklings_ , he thought... then was immediately disgusted with himself for it. _Like sheep_ , he corrected himself fiercely.

“What do you want?” he prompted, a bit sharper than he intended. “You said you needed to talk – talk.”

The two of them hesitated. They shared a look, then Stiles cleared his throat. “You, uh – the other night you said you weren't with Scott the whole time, right? Like, you caught up to him in the woods but you don't know what happened between then and him breaking out of the cuffs?”

“Because,” Scott took over then, that edge of worry creeping back into his tone, “something happened and I... I think I was there for it? Or maybe I did it. I don't know. I just... When I woke up there was blood and...”

Derek stared at the both of them for a moment, eyes narrowed slightly as he put the pieces together.

Scott was standing there bleeding worry and self-doubt, genuinely concerned over whatever it was he thought might have happened on the full moon. It was hard to tell if Stiles was as worried, his scent masked with body spray and medication, but there was an edge of concern in the way he was looking at his friend.

If they'd been asking about wildlife, Stiles would probably be closer to laughing. Derek remembered what boys his age were like.

“You didn't kill the bus driver,” he said with a sigh. “And before you go jumping to any _conclusions_ ,” Derek added a beat later, “I didn't either. You ate a squirrel, it happens.”

“I _ate_ a squirrel?” Scott repeated, wide eyed with horror.

“It happens?” Stiles added, momentarily looking gleeful before reality snapped back into place and he remembered what they were there to talk about. “No, wait. So far the official report is saying mountain lion. Like, the guy was clawed to death,” he said, emphasising the word 'clawed' by curling his fingers into the air. “We saw the scene –”

“Sort of,” Scott interrupted. “It was roped off already when we got there, but you could see there was a lot of blood.”

“– and the back doors of the bus were ripped open in a way that did not suggest mountain lion,” Stiles finished. He stared expectantly at Derek with one eyebrow slightly raised.

“That's bad enough,” Scott continued, his voice a little quieter than usual. “But I had this dream last night... Well, more of a nightmare. Where I was clawing this guy to pieces. It felt real, like it was something that I'd done in real life.”

“You might have heard it happen,” Derek admitted with a shrug. “All I did was make sure you didn't leave the preserve, the school's close enough to the woods that you could have heard it miles away.”

Scott breathed out. He seemed to sag in obvious relief, though the anxiety-notes in his scent lingered in the still air inside the house. “Ok,” he said. “Ok, so I didn't do it.”

“Yeah, but who did?” The question came from Stiles, who was watching Derek's face as he spoke – looking for clues, maybe. Watching for ticks to see if he was telling the truth. “I mean, we've only got your word that you didn't and we've only got your word that you didn't bite Scott. You say it wasn't you, so who was it? How many other werewolves are there in Beacon Hills?”

Derek matched the teen stare for stare, reluctantly impressed (but still annoyed) when Stiles didn't look away. “There used to be nine,” he said finally.

“But now there's not.”

“No.”

“So how many are there?”

“There's me,” Derek ticked them off one by one in reply with a scowl. “Scott –“

“How do we really know that you didn't bite me?” Scott interrupted before he could finish. “Stiles is right, all we actually have is your word that you didn't do it. How do I know you're not lying about it so I'll trust you?”

“Because you have to be an alpha to turn someone,” Derek snapped, the words bitten off with a hint of teeth. “Didn't I tell you that?” Scott shook his head and Derek sighed, internally asking for patience. “You have to be an alpha to give someone the bite. Betas can't turn anyone, only an alpha can, and I'm not an alpha.”

“How do we know?”

“For fuck's sake!” Derek went to pinch the bridge of his nose in frustration, realised he was still holding onto the shirt he'd come to get, let his arm drop back down to his side and clenched his hands into fists instead. “What do you want me to do here? You wanted to know if you murdered the bus driver – you didn't. You want to know how many wolves are in Beacon Hills – I told you. You want to know how to tell if someone's an alpha? Their eyes glow red. Red means alpha. This –” he let his eyes flare blue, gestured towards his face with a sharp movement of his free hand “– is not 'alpha'. And while we're at it, yeah, the alpha killed the bus driver. Yes, I know who he is. And no, I'm not going to tell you. It's best for everyone if you stay out of the way. Like I am,” Derek added bitterly.

Because that's essentially what he was doing. Keeping the new wolf from fucking things up. Making sure he didn't get in the way. In charge of staying out if it while Peter did everything himself.

“Wait a second,” Stiles held up a hand. “You _know_ who killed the bus driver?”

“You know who bit me,” Scott accused, actually looking a little betrayed. “Why would you keep that to yourself?”

“You know who killed the guy and you're not even thinking about maybe telling the police?”

Derek rolled his eyes. “The police can't help.”

He'd had enough of this. His patience had run out and he was sick of the questions. Sick of the accusations of untrustworthiness and how he was keeping things from these two _for their own good_.

There weren't even supposed to be two of them.

He was only meant to be babysitting Scott, not Scott-and-Stiles. But it seemed like they came as a pair, so the only way to keep Scott out of the way was to deal with Stiles being along for the ride.

“You get the police involved, that's a good way to get people killed,” Derek added flatly, then stomped past the two teens and out of the house, ignoring them when they trailed along behind, throwing questions and accusations at his back.

It was only when he got to the car that Derek remembered that he'd said he'd give them his phone number.

He turned on his heel, hand thrust out. “Phone,” he demanded, twitching his fingers for emphasis. “Your phone,” Derek growled at Stiles when all the boy did was gape at him. “My number.”

“Right! Right,” Stiles jumped to action, fumbling in his pockets and nearly dropping his phone before handing it over.

Derek quickly typed in his own number and hit the call button. He hung up the second he heard the buzz of an incoming call and tossed the phone back to Stiles. He was in the car and driving off before the screen had even gone dark. Though not quite quickly enough to miss it when Scott leaned close to Stiles and murmured decisively; “We have to figure out who the alpha is.”


	6. Chapter Six - Post Traumatic Stress

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Derek has a very bad night. Stiles proves himself reliable.

The mountain lion fooled enough people that Derek genuinely wondered whether the people of Beacon Hills had been huffing paint.

He hadn’t even been there and even he could see the hunter ploy. Get the law off their backs so they could focus on the real threat. Get the population at large back to their usual levels of complacency so they wouldn’t impede the hunt. Make it a big display so plenty of people would be there to see the whole thing and gossip about it to their friends, giving the added bonus of ingratiating the hunter to the general public.

Even if he weren’t in on it, he could have said it wouldn’t work.

It was in the paper the next day – front page, visible from the display at the supermarket – two bodies found at the outlook in the preserve. A crime with an obviously human culprit. It could possibly have passed as an unfortunate accident if it weren’t for the lack of scorch marks on the ground. People didn’t tend to fold themselves neatly into oil drums and set themselves on fire. Apparently they hadn’t found the second body until they tried to remove the first from the barrel.

They were listed in the article as John Does, but Derek knew who they were. He’d been there when Peter had slipped out of his room at the Long Term Care ward to go and track them down, fully prepared to cover for his uncle if anyone other than Jennifer happened to pop their head in.

It hadn’t been a full moon.

Peter was getting stronger. A change that both he and Derek attributed to finally having his heart mate back.

Kate showed up in town the very next day.

Something that Derek only discovered when he was shot.

He'd been taking a shortcut back to the motel after visiting Peter, on foot because after the whole mountain lion incident he didn't want to make himself easier to track by parking the very noticeable camaro in the hospital parking lot. It also was easier to avoid CCTV cameras on foot, and he knew full well that hunters liked to try and hack those when they could.

She must have seen him there anyway. Maybe she'd gone straight to Beacon Hills Memorial when she arrived, intending to check in on her supposedly comatose victim. Maybe intending to kill Peter in his bed if the opportunity presented itself. Whatever the reason, she'd seen Derek some time since he'd left the hospital and had recognised him.

She had to have recognised him, he thought, or marked him as a werewolf somehow.

She had to, or else she shot random strangers for fun in every town she came to.

He registered the sound of it first. The unmistakable crack of a gun being fired in an urban area – something he'd only ever heard at a distance.

The pain came next, a split second after the sound, a burst of fire in his upper arm. Sharp and stabbing, with a horrible sick kind of numbness to the rest of the limb below.

Derek ducked out of the way by instinct. He threw himself to the side, coming to a stop behind a dumpster that felt like too-little protection. He paused there for a moment – just a moment, though in his panic it felt much longer – then he made himself move.

To the left. Up. Over the fence that separated a shop's loading dock from the rest of the alley. Up again, using the drainpipe bolted to the side of the building, until he was on the roof. Then he dropped, flopping onto the flat roof of the single storey shop.

Safe at an angle she couldn't possibly hit from the ground.

He lay there on his back, arm burning, bleeding, nerves shooting stabs of pain all the way down to his fingers with every breath.

He very distantly heard a phone ring. Generic ringtone. And then her voice, barely remembered but familiar enough to place.

“...just got in to town,” she was saying. “I had to make a little pitstop, but I'll be there soon.... What kind of a pit stop? The kind that you don't need to worry about. In fact, I may have just solved our alpha problem. I'm pretty sure I just winged him, but he won't last long without an antidote anyway.”

_Fuck_. Derek squeezed his eyes shut, gritting his teeth together to stop himself from making a noise at that revelation. Of course a hunter would use a bullet with wolfsbane in it. Of course she'd make sure a non-fatal shot could still kill.

There was a pause, the voice on the other end of the line speaking but too muffled for Derek to hear.

Kate laughed. “Don't worry so much. I'm hanging up now. I'll see you in five.”

Another pause. Long enough that Derek had to assume that she'd hung up. He listened for the sound of shoes against bitumen but heard nothing.

“I hope it was worth it, sweetie,” Kate's voice called out into the dark. “When you're dead I'll go back and kill your brain dead pack mate.”

Derek ground his teeth together hard enough that he could hear them creak.

He stayed where he was, until he finally heard her leave, the sound of her car mixing with a distant wail of police sirens. Evidently someone had heard the shot and decided to call it in, which meant that it was time for him to leave as well.

Derek rolled up onto his feet, trying not to jostle his wounded arm too much.

He could feel the wolfsbane working already, slowly poisoning him from the inside and effecting his healing. A normal bullet wound would have stopped bleeding by now. A normal bullet wound would be starting to close. The wound in his arm was weeping blood in a steady trickle – not enough to concern him on its own, but enough that if it didn't ever stop he might die of blood loss before the poison in the bullet got to his heart.

He needed to get the bullet out.

He needed to get off the damn roof.

How he got down from the roof and back to his motel room was a blur. The timeline of events was fuzzy around the edges. One moment Derek was trying to figure out how to get down without hurting himself further, the next he was slamming the door shut behind him and trying to get his jacket off with his left arm only semi-cooperative.

Derek stumbled his way into the tiny bathroom, leaving a smear of blood against the door frame.

His reflection stared out at him from the rectangular mirror above the sink, wild-eyed and pale.

Derek stared back, thoughts racing through his brain in a way that was somehow both panicked and detached. He might be disassociating again, the whole situation starting to feel less and less real. Or maybe it was shock. He'd been injured plenty of times before in his life – often self inflicted – but being shot was different.

The thought came and went that maybe he should have gone back to the hospital (that was what humans did when they were shot, wasn't it). Back to Peter – he'd do anything to be in Peter's arms right now, to have his alpha leech the pain and tell him 'it'll be alright, duckling'. Peter would know what to do, how to find an antidote to the poison.

To get to Peter he had to go to the hospital and in this state he'd never manage to get there unnoticed.

Hospitals came with questions. Tests. Records. People would _know_ he'd been shot. People would be there to see it if and when his body started rejecting itself as it tried to purge the wolfsbane in his system. And Peter... there was no way Peter could ever pretend to be catatonic still if he saw him like this. He'd ruin his cover, and Kate would know that Derek wasn't the alpha she was after. Peter would be exposed, the hunters would come for him, and unless they wanted to be on the run forever there would be no way out.

But what else could he do?

Derek looked down at the hole in his arm. It went in on one side but it didn't come out the other. A pit instead of a tunnel.

Clumsy claws dug into the wound before his mind fully caught up to what his fingers were doing. The flare of pain had him biting back a yell, vision gone gray at the edges. Derek swayed. He tore his claws from the wound – a mistake that only added another layer of awful to the pain – and braced himself against he sink so he wouldn't fall over.

Not his best idea.

But the bullet needed to come out.

He needed help.

Who in the fuck could he ask for help?

He fumbled in his pockets for his phone and unlocked the screen. Flicked to the contacts and stared at the pathetically small list. Then he made a choice and stabbed his thumb at a name, smearing blood across the glass.

The phone rang only twice before the call picked up. Surprisingly fast compared to what he'd been expecting.

“Yo, what's up? Kind of weird for you to be calling at this hour by the way and if you're after Scott he's not here and if you're after me I'm both flattered and wary and a little bit disturbed. Also, you know it's a school night, right?”

“Stiles,” Derek growled out from between gritted teeth, “I've been shot.”

“Great. So you want me to warn Scott about hunters being out tonight...?”

“Wolfsbane bullet. It's not healing. Need your help.”

Every word was an ounce of concentration he felt like he didn't have, the wound in his arm constantly trying to pull his focus away.

“...okay,” Stiles said the word slowly, drawing the two syllables out much farther than necessary. “And, uh, how exactly am I supposed to help you with that?”

“Need you to come here. Get the bullet out.” And once the bullet was out he could figure out what kind of wolfsbane she'd used. Then hope that it was something common and easy to find.

“No, I don't think that's a good idea. I mean, I could get Scott to come help you. Scott's probably a way better choice for that. If you think I'd be able to help you extract a bullet then you better think again because I'm sorta feeling queasy just thinking about it.”

“Fine. Get Scott. Don't have a lot of time. Wolfsbane. Is. Poison,” Derek emphasised.

“Ok, alright, fine. I'll pick him up on the way. I'm coming. Don't... don't die before I get there. I don't wanna have to explain to my dad why I'm out stumbling across bodies in the night.”

Derek gave Stiles the address of the motel and the room number, then hung up before he could listen to any more protesting or rambling.

It took longer than Derek would have liked – much longer than he'd expected – for Stiles to show up and when he did he was alone, Scott nowhere to be seen. By that point Derek was sitting on the floor near the bathroom, back propped up against the wall. Mostly because he'd gotten lightheaded after unlocking the door and partially because of a strange compulsion not to bleed on the bed.

Stiles stumbled in through the door and stopped dead. He stared, mouth slightly open as if he hadn't actually expected to see Derek shot and bleeding on the floor. To his credit, the shock didn't last more than second. Then he shook it off and moved to crouch down beside the older man.

“Well crap,” Stiles said eloquently. “I was kind of hoping I'd hallucinated you saying you'd been shot.”

“Nope.” Derek glanced over the teen's shoulder. “Scott?”

“Yeah, no. I couldn't find him and he's not answering his phone. I stopped by his house on the way here just in case but... It's you and me,” Stiles shrugged helplessly. “He's probably with Allison or something,” Stiles added in a mutter than Derek probably wasn't supposed to hear.

“Fine,” Derek said, trying to figure out what the next step should be and beginning to have some difficulty with the whole _thinking_ side of things. “We'll cope. Help me up.”

“Okay. Right.” Stiles darted around to Derek's side and let the werewolf get his arm around his shoulders. He counted to three, then Derek heaved himself upright and onto his feet. “Bed?” Stiles suggested when Derek was standing, the kid's arm around his waist for extra support.

“Bathroom. Tiles.”

“That's not my name,” Stiles said, the joke clearly a reflex given the situation.

Three steps later, Derek leaning on the teenager much more than he'd like to admit, and Stiles pulled them up short before they could squeeze through the doorway and into the tiny motel bathroom. “Yeah, that's not going to work,” he said, eyeing the small space warily. “Like, I'm doubting you could even fit the both of us in there. You'd have to be in the tub or something and then what if it doesn't work and we need to get you back out? It's never going to happen.” He looked around desperately, shifting his shoulders a little uncomfortably underneath Derek's weight. “Is there anywhere else we could go? Like, secret hide out, abandoned hospital wing...?”

“Hospital,” Derek said, latching onto that word and forgetting all of his very good reasons why he shouldn't go there.

“Okay, okay, that I can do.” Stiles nodded to himself. “Lets get you to the car.”

“Not the front,” Derek said as they shuffled out to the car. “Ground floor, sixteen, long term care. There's a window.”

“You know someone there,” Stiles guessed, hovering anxiously while Derek stuffed himself into the passenger seat of Stiles' jeep. “Someone who can help?”

“Peter.”

To his credit, Stiles didn't ask questions after that. He very much looked like he wanted to, like he was creating a list of questions in his mind that he fully intended to bombard Derek with at a later date, but he didn't' voice them aloud. He just got in behind the wheel and drove them to the hospital, glancing over at Derek every now and then as if to make sure he was still awake and breathing.

Which told Derek that he must be starting to look pretty terrible.

When they got to the hospital Stiles made the right turn without needing to be told, driving away from the main parking lot and instead circling around to the lesser-used small lot outside the long term care ward. The courtyard was mostly dark, the shadows kept at bay by a few lights in the windows and a lonely street lamp near the visitor's entrance. Derek spared a thought for the possibility of CCTV cameras before Stiles was suddenly out of the car and opening up the passenger door to help him out.

“Sixteen,” Derek said again when he had both feet on the ground, swaying dangerously while Stiles hovered and offered what physical support a comparatively skinny sixteen year old could. “Window. That way.”

The trip from jeep to window felt absurdly long, though in truth it couldn't have taken more than a minute or two. Each step felt like it required a disproportionate amount of effort, like he was struggling through deep water or mud and not just crossing a neatly manicured lawn. Worse, each jolting step set the nerves in his arm alight, making it even harder to force one foot in front of the other.

It shouldn't work like that, he thought to himself. An arm wound shouldn't hurt from walking.

“You are so lucky,” Stiles muttered, huffing and puffing as he helped keep Derek upright, “that I'm a nice person. I could've left you in that motel room, maybe called you an ambulance. Instead I'm helping drag your ass through the landscaping to some mystery dude at the nursing home.”

“Screw yourself.”

“Screw _yourself_ , Derek. Next time I'm gonna leave you.”

Derek didn't respond, more interested in the movement he could see at the window ahead. A familiar figure pacing back and forth in front of the window. The lights inside were off, but Derek didn't need them on to know who it was. He could tell just from the way the figure moved that they were headed for the right room.

By the time they actually got to the window it was already open and Peter was standing there ready to pull him through, tense and agitated at the smell of his nephew's blood.

At the sight of the man in the window – heavily scarred, wearing hospital issue pyjamas and an air of impatience – Stiles faltered, coming to a sudden stop that almost had Derek topple over into the bushes by the wall.

“This is the guy?” Stiles asked warily, clearly not about to trust any random person just because they happened to be in the right window. Or maybe the wariness was just a reaction to seeing someone who looked like Derek's uncle did – he was constantly forgetting how horrific Peter's scarring was when you were seeing it for the first time.

“Peter,” Derek said, simultaneously confirming that he knew the man and asking his uncle for help. He lurched forward out of Stiles' supporting grip and towards the window, coming to a stop against the waist-high sill.

“You're shot,” Peter accused, though he was already reaching out to help steady his nephew through the open window. “Hunters,” he guessed, looking at the wound. “We need to get you inside.”

Inside.

That was a very good idea.

Derek moved to try and get through on his own and immediately regretted it when his wounded arm refused to hold his weight. Instead of vaulting neatly through the window he slammed into the sill half-in and half-out, the impact rattling the frame.

Peter steadied him before he could slide back out and into the bushes. He hooked his hands under Derek's armpits and pulled him through the window properly, awkward only because it was difficult to do without hurting him too much.

“Get in and shut the window,” Peter said to Stiles over Derek's shoulder, a hint of alpha in his tone. He turned away from the boy and the window, half-carrying Derek to the bed. “Wolfsbane?” he asked his nephew, his voice much gentler. “How long?”

“Nine?” Derek guessed. “After I left.” He grunted when Peter lowered him onto the mattress, trying not to show how much just that little bit of pressure hurt.

“You can help him, right?” Stiles piped up from by the window. The teen scrambled his way gracelessly inside and hastily turned to shut the window behind him. “You're able to do something about the wolfsbane?”

He still sounded wary, suspicious of the strange man that he'd never met before manhandling the guy he'd only met a few times before.

It was almost touching. Derek hadn't imagined either of the teens he'd been babysitting cared about him at all as a person, but clearly Stiles at least seemed to care whether he lived or died.

“I can do something about the bullet,” Peter said, in the middle of carefully ripping Derek's shirt sleeve away to better expose the still-weeping hole in his arm. “I need you to hold him down for me.”

Derek grit his teeth and shut his eyes, already having figured out what came next.

Stiles, on the other hand, wasted a moment gaping at Peter in incredulity. “Me!? I could barely even keep him upright when he was walking, how am I going to hold him down?”

Peter turned to face the teenager, an overly patient look on his face as he explained; “Wolfsbane poisoning makes us weak. Derek is already bad enough that he can hardly walk on his own, you'll be able to hold him. At the shoulders please,” he added when Stiles reluctantly came over to stand on the other side of the bed, “this isn't going to be pleasant and I don't want him bucking up off the bed while I've got my claws in his arm, understand?”

There was a small hesitation, then Stiles blew out a breath. “Okay,” he said, sounding resigned.

Arms pressed Derek down firmly against the thin hospital mattress. They felt surprisingly strong for a teenage human, or maybe he was just that weak from the wolfsbane that it just seemed that way.

“Try not to clench your teeth, duckling.” Peter said, which was the only warning Derek got before claws were suddenly cutting into his wounded arm.

It burned, slicing through to his core despite Peter's care to be gentle. Despite his uncle's instruction Derek found himself grinding his teeth together so hard that he could hear it resonate through his skull, his hands clenched into fists and claws digging into his palms. Then suddenly the worst of the burning, stabbing pain in his arm was gone, leaving only the sharp throbbing ache from before.

“You can let go,” Peter said, and for a second Derek thought he was talking to _him_ before he realised Stiles was still holding him down.

Derek's eyes opened to see his uncle holding a compacted scrap of silvery metal between two bloody claws.

Peter brought the bloody metal lump up to his nose and delicately sniffed, a look of concentration on his face as he looked for the smells beneath the blood. If anything was left to smell. “A bit of luck,” Peter said after a moment. “I recognise the strain.”

“Antidote?” Derek asked, feeling slightly better now that he was lying down and didn't have the source of the poison in his arm still but still knowing that he was in no means out of the woods yet.

“We have some,” Peter confirmed. “In the vault.” He glanced at the door, then at the window. “I'll have to get it. You'd never make it there in your state. You'll have to stay,” he said to Stiles, the teen looking rather affronted at being ordered around. “Keep him awake as long as you can and I'll be back as soon as I can manage it.”

“You're going _where_ exactly?” Stiles demanded. “And how – you're a patient here, I know that much – how are you going to –”

“Questions when I get back,” Peter interrupted, using that hint-of-alpha again. “A nurse might come in while I'm gone,” he said as he opened up the window again. “She can dress the wound if she thinks it will help, but tell her I'll eat her lungs if she even thinks of hurting him.”

He was gone before Stiles could open his mouth to protest.

Denied the opportunity to argue, Stiles huffed out a sigh and instead turned with his arms crossed to look at Derek. “So,” he said, mouth set in a way that made him look older and much more serious, “want to tell me what another werewolf is doing hanging out in Beacon Hills Memorial, threatening nurses and running out into the night in pyjamas?”

“No,” Derek replied bluntly.

“I'm getting answers,” Stiles announced, sitting himself down in the chair by the wall. “Also, by the way, it's still a school night.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have officially finished writing the whole of this fic, all that's left is a bit of polishing. Which means that it will definitely be finished and not abandoned!
> 
> Unfortunately, it means I'm now having ideas for a S2AU that will probably never happen.


	7. Chapter Seven - Sharing With the Group

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Peter gives Stiles an edited, easy to swallow version of the truth. Later, a snap decision leads to what may be the first step towards making a friend.

Derek didn't remember Peter's return, or the painful process of burning the wolfsbane out of his system. He didn't recall vomiting on the floor either but the evidence was there beside the bed – a thick black sludge that looked more like crude oil than something that could possibly come out of a living body. He came back to proper consciousness in time to hear Stiles throw a quiet accusation across the room.

“You're the alpha, aren't you? You're the one who bit Scott.”

Peter, standing close at Derek's side with his fingers still covered in ash, didn't look the least bit perturbed. “Who?”

“Don't play dumb, asshole. It's pretty obvious you're the guy who's been killing people too, just so you know,” Stiles added, a hearty dose of sarcasm mixing in with those last few words. “So you better start talking and tell me why I shouldn't just hand you over to whoever shot Derek because from where I'm standing triple homicide isn't something you get to just walk away from.”

“Isn't it?” Peter asked mildly. _Dangerously_ mildly.

“Peter...” Derek started, trailing off when he realised he didn't know what to say.

Peter looked down and offered his nephew a smile that was both reassuring and full of obvious relief at seeing him awake and aware. “Don't worry, duckling,” he said softly, “I'm not going to do anything. I like – Stiles, is it? – I like Stiles. He helped save you from wolfsbane poisoning.”

Derek sighed, too tired to argue the merits of discretion. Stiles' friend had been thrust head-first into the supernatural, he should learn that they couldn't always play by human rules. “Right.”

Peter smiled again, then turned back to Stiles. “Yes,” he said plainly, “I am the alpha, and I bit your friend in the woods. In my defence I was alone at the time, my pack hadn't come back to me yet and I wasn't... in the best frame of mind. It was an accident and it shouldn't have happened, but it did. Being angry with me for it changes nothing.”

“And the murders?” Stiles pressed, chin jutted forward stubbornly.

“Revenge,” Peter replied simply. “For the murder of ten innocent people, four of them children under the age of ten. For this,” he gestured to his scarred right side, “and six years of agony as it healed. And for the cover-up that ensured none of the people responsible would ever be punished by human law.”

_For taking away my heart mate_ , Derek heard when Peter glanced back at him.

Stiles' eyes flicked back and forth between them, looking from Peter to Derek and back again. “The Hale fire,” he said, connecting the dots together. “You're Peter _Hale_.” A beat. “The fire was set by hunters, wasn't it? That's why it was so weird. I remember my dad looking over the case file, he was convinced something didn't add up before all the reports came back and the old sheriff made him drop it. You were the only survivor...” Stiles' brow furrowed slightly, then his eyes widened. “You were in a coma. That's why Derek's sister came back, isn't it? Because you woke up.”

“The coma was only the first couple of years,” Peter said, actually sounding amused at how Stiles was putting everything together, “it was more of a locked-in state after that.”

“Okay. So Derek's sister came back because she could, I don't know, feel her alpha coming out of the locked-in state?”

“Laura was the alpha,” Derek corrected, unable to help himself. “She took us away after the fire, to keep us safe. She left Peter behind.”

Stiles frowned at that. “I thought it was genetic,” he said slowly. “Like you either were an alpha or you weren't. I mean, you said betas are different from alphas and it's only alphas that can turn people. If it's not something you're born with then it has to be something that can be passed on...”

“Very clever,” Peter nodded in approval, thought Derek wasn't so sure it was such a good idea to encourage Stiles to work things out. “Alphas can be born, supposedly, but that's something more along the lines of legend. The alpha spark passes from one wolf to another at the point of death. If an alpha dies naturally the spark will go to whichever pack member is best suited to take it. If the alpha is killed, the spark will pass to the wolf in closest proximity. I happened to be in closest proximity at the time of Laura's death.”

Derek had to keep his features schooled so he didn't roll his eyes.

He remembered this from before the fire as well – the way Peter would say things that were perfectly true while also leaving out very important pieces of information. Or arrange things so that the rules were being followed well enough that nobody could argue about it, but he was still technically doing things he shouldn't be.

Like buying Derek sex toys because they weren't allowed to touch one another. Or making out in the woods because technically it wasn't in public and they were still keeping their hands above the waist.

“I was still in New York,” Derek added drily, doing his part to obfuscate the truth.

“Okay,” Stiles nodded to himself. “I think I've got the timeline down. Let me know if I've got this right... Hunters burned down the Hale house. You wound up in a coma and Laura took Derek to New York. You woke up. Laura came back because... Why? Because something was happening to catch her attention. Because you were already gearing up for revenge on the hunters. That's it, right?” Stiles leaned forward, looking back and forth between both wolves. “ _That's_ why Laura came back, she saw something or heard something and she came back to either talk you out of it or to help you but you'd already drawn the hunters in.”

“It was unfortunate...” Peter said, an odd look crossing his face a moment as he admitted; “I'm sorry that she died. I wish it could have been avoided.” He paused a moment, then shook his head. “I can't say I regret becoming alpha. It's made things... easier.” Peter's smile pulled at his scars. “You should know, it is just me. Derek isn't involved in this revenge past knowing what I've done and what I plan to do.” A beat. “And keeping your friend out of it for me.”

“Scott,” Stiles said, and covered his face with his hands. “Crap. What the hell am I going to tell Scott about this? There's no way he's going to side with you, by the way. Me – okay, I can kinda see where you're coming from with the whole revenge for having murdered your whole family thing. If someone did that to my dad I'd probably be doing the same thing – but Scott?”

“You could not tell him,” Derek offered, personally feeling that was the best scenario for everyone.

After just a few meetings he already knew Scott wasn't the kind of guy you could trust. Not because he had bad intentions, but because he was the kind of guy who thought it was a good idea for a newly bitten werewolf to go to a party on the full moon. The kind of guy who didn't seem to understand that his choices had potentially dangerous consequences both for himself and the people around him.

“He's my best friend,” Stiles pointed out stubbornly. “And a werewolf. This affects him too.”

“Does it?”

“He's a werewolf,” Stiles repeated, and waved an arm in Peter's direction, “thanks to your uncle alpha here. You can't tell me people who literally hunt werewolves would leave him alone just because he's not the one out there gunning for revenge.”

“As much as I don't want to admit it,” Peter sighed, about as pleased as Derek was with the idea of cluing Scott in to what was going on around him, “he does make a point. Argent isn't exactly discriminatory in her kills. If –”

“Argent,” Stiles repeated sharply, interrupting Peter. “Argent as in like Chris and Victoria Argent? Kate Argent? _Allison_ Argent? Those Argents?”

Derek looked at Peter, eyebrows slightly raised. The look he got in return was much the same, his uncle clearly surprised that Stiles knew those names.

“Kate was the one who set the fire,” Peter said mildly. “But yes. Those Argents.”

Memory sparked. Part of a conversation overheard at a teenager's house party. Derek shook his head in disbelief. “Scott's dating Allison. She's an Argent.”

-

When Derek finally returned to his motel room it was coming into the twilight of early morning. The smell of old blood lingered in the stale air, mixed with a faint bitter unpleasantness. Trace amounts of wolfsbane, not even enough to identify by scent alone. Just enough to add another layer to the blood.

Derek looked around at the room, the smears of rust against the eggshell-white walls and hand prints against the bathroom door. He scowled at the evidence, silently kissing goodbye to his security deposit.

They'd probably bill him for the cleaning too. If they didn't call the cops in just to make sure he hadn't killed anyone in the bathroom.

Because that was all he needed, having to explain that it was all his own blood but no, he didn't have any injuries or cuts to prove it.

Maybe he could say it was a particularly prolific nose bleed.

Humans got those sometimes, right?

Fuck it. Derek dismissed that line of thought with a grunt. He kicked his boots off, stripped off the blood-stained, ripped-up remains of his shirt, and collapsed face first onto the bed. He'd deal with it all later.

He woke up some time later to the insistent buzzing noise made by his phone, the device somehow on the floor near where he'd kicked his boots off, almost fully charged and miraculously pristine.

It was fucking indestructible, that phone.

With a sound of pure annoyance, Derek slithered off the bed and onto the floor. He scooped up the phone and answered without stopping to check who was calling him. It could only be one of a few people, and every single one of them should know to expect the irritated single-word greeting that he bit out; “What.”

“Our chemistry teacher had his house broken into last night,” Stiles' voice sailed out of the speaker, slightly distorted by the electronics but still much more awake and alert than Derek felt he had any right to be. “People are saying he had both his legs broken and Allison's aunt was hanging around outside the school this morning flashing a badge that I'm pretty sure is fake and asking about the kids in his classes.”

“ _What_ ,” Derek said, much sharper.

“So you and I have to have a chat about this whole hunter werewolf thing.”

“The fuck, Stiles.”

“Sans Scott,” Stiles continued, his tone very dry, “and not just because he's been ditching me for hunter junior all day and I can't get him alone to tell him what's going on.”

Derek pinched the bridge of his nose – just a little too tight so he could feel the pressure in his sinuses – and took a deep breath. “What time is it?” he asked.

“Dude, you don't know what the time is? It's like one o'clock. Have you been sleeping all day? I'm exhausted and you've been sleeping all day.”

For a moment – just a moment – Derek considered hanging up on him. Then he sighed. “I'm coming.”

“What, to the school?” Stiles sounded startled. “I have class in like two minutes – I can skip class,” he added hastily, “it's only english lit – it's just that you kind of stick out and I was under the impression you guys maybe didn't want to draw to much attention to yourselves...”

“Go to the boiler room in the basement,” Derek instructed, ignoring Stiles' rambling. “I'll be ten minutes.”

Derek hung up and slipped the phone into the pocket of his jeans. He grabbed a fresh shirt, put his keys in his other pocket, and stuck the 'do not disturb' sign up on the door on his way out. He bypassed the car, since it was flashy enough that anyone watching the school would notice it. Instead he fell into an easy jog, keeping his pace to what any bystanders would consider to be 'normal' until he hit the woods. Any time that he'd lost on the streets he made up for while hidden by the trees, running at his own, proper pace until he hit the edge of the high school's sports fields.

From there it was a matter of confidence to keep any possible observers from wondering what he was doing on the grounds.

He crossed the grass field at a crisp walk and slipped into the building through the locker room entrance. Once he was inside it was easy to avoid anyone who might have otherwise crossed his path, anyone wandering the halls far too loud for him not to hear long before they were within view.

He reached the boiler room exactly ten minutes after he'd left the motel, as promised.

Stiles was already waiting for him there, fidgeting nervously as he waited. Arms crossed one moment, picking at a loose thread on his hoodie the next, then swinging down by his sides. He straightened up when he noticed Derek's arrival, not quite startled so much as he was clearly impatient.

“Just so you know,” the teen began, before Derek had even said anything, “meeting in the basement? Kind of giving off a serial killer vibe here, man. You couldn't have picked somewhere less creepy?”

“No.”

Mainly because he hadn't actually picked the boiler room for the conversation they were going to have.

Derek walked over to the wall opposite the boiler, trying to remember where exactly the mechanism for the lock was. It'd been a long while since he'd been down this way – last time he'd used the entrance out near the school sign.

“What are you –” Stiles started to ask.

“Shut up.” Derek shoved a bunch of shelving to the side, wincing at the screeching noise of the metal base scraping the floor. He flicked his claws out and inserted them delicately into the edges of the carved triskelion that had been revealed, then turned his wrist as if turning a door knob.

He stepped back to give the door some space and had to smirk at Stiles' exclamation of 'holy shit' when the wall opened up to reveal the cavernous room beyond. Lit by old florescent lights that buzzed softly overhead, the room had the feel of library stacks or a storage room in a museum. A large, empty space populated only by shelves full of old, dusty things.

Used only infrequently, forgotten in between. 

Derek stepped through into the gloom and turned to look at the teen, smirk only growing wider at the look on Stiles' face. “You coming?”

“Holy shit yes.” Stiles hastily followed him inside, jumping a little when the door automatically slid shut behind them. He looked around at the shelves with their jars and books and forgotten treasures, mouth hanging slightly open. “I could be inside a murder room and I don't even care. This is... how long has this been under the school!?”

Derek shrugged. “I don't know. It was here before the school. That's what I was always told.”

“Bullshit this came first,” Stiles scoffed, pausing at a stack of books to read the spines. “It literally opens up into the boiler room. What even is this place?”

“The Hale vault.”

It'd been a split second decision, made when he was still half asleep, but it seemed like the right one. Stiles wasn't pack, but he was getting close to the edges of it. He knew more than he should, about both werewolves in general and about Peter's plan. His friend was a new wolf (and a bad one at that) who was dating a hunter, which put him close to danger on two counts without really knowing what he was getting into. And he'd helped save Derek's life – he was owed something more than a brush off and bullshit about staying out of the way.

It didn't hurt that showing his cards this way was more likely to keep Stiles from running off to the authorities (or to the hunters).

_I show you my belly_ , Derek thought drily, _you show me yours_.

He very pointedly did not think about that old advice from Dr Zellek. That if he was going to make friends he might have better luck with younger people. People closer to his own supposed mental maturity.

Stiles stopped reading the spines of the books and turned to look at Derek, arms crossed over his chest as he rocked back and forth on his heels. “So...” He drew the word out into two syllables, paused, then got down to the crux of the matter; “Argents, huh? Kate Argent, specifically. Allison's aunt, who apparently set fire to your house six years ago and murdered a bunch of innocent people. Just exactly how dangerous is she and how worried should I be that Scott's meant to have dinner with Allison and her parents tonight?”

“Six years ago she came to Beacon Hills with the sole intent of killing us all,” Derek said, reciting it all as if it had happened to someone else.

As if it hadn't taken him years to stop having nightmares about Peter and his family burning.

Laying it out bluntly like he would have in therapy if Laura hadn't made him tell the version of events that didn't involve werewolves or hunters or a predatory woman gaining the trust of a teenager under her care.

“She got a job as a substitute teacher,” Derek explained. “She probably got rid of the teacher she replaced just so she could do it. While she was there she tried to gain our trust, mine and my sister's. I didn't even notice, I thought she was just some young teacher trying to be cool, but Laura actually liked her. Laura opened up to her, told her some things about our family. She was pretending to be my sister's friend while she was recruiting people to help her burn our house down. She waited until a day everyone was supposed to be home, then she trapped everyone inside with mountain ash and set the house on fire. She used an accelerant to make it burn faster so nobody could get out. She knew that some of my cousins were human and she didn't care...”

Derek paused for an attempt at a calming breath, aware that at some point he'd started clenching his hands, still-human nails biting into his palms. “She came to visit Peter in the hospital after we left,” he continued, “told him that if he ever woke up she'd come back and finish the job. If I were you, I'd be _very_ worried about Scott's dinner plans. She won't be working alone now either. Not with the other Argents in town.”

“Crap.” Stiles was wide-eyed, blinking rapidly as he digested all the information Derek had just dumped on him. “Okay, so, yeah, be worried about Scott.”

“If any of the Argents figure out what he is, they'll assume he's working with Peter,” Derek added, just so Stiles knew exactly how serious things were. “Wolves usually follow their alpha's lead, especially bitten wolves. They have to. Scott's not part of our pack, but they'll think he is. Hunters would kill him anyway, even without a pack. New wolves are dangerous without an alpha to keep them in line on the full moon.”

“That's the other thing we need to talk about.”

“What?”

“Your uncle. Peter,” Stiles clarified, as if Derek might have more than one uncle lurking around anywhere, “the alpha. I get the feeling I didn't get the full story last night and I've gotta say I'm not really comfortable just letting things lie. I mean... If I'm adding things up right then he may have broken my chemistry teachers legs last night? This is when he was meant to be out getting antidote for you, while you were lying poisoned in the hospital bed where's he's pretending to be catatonic while he finishes up his whole murderous revenge spree. True,” Stiles cast his eyes around the space around them, sort of turning on the spot before looking back at Derek, “Mr Harris does live between the school and the hospital so if the antidote was in here then maybe it was on the way... But still. He did that while you were _actively dying_. I'm not wholly convinced I should be trusting him.”

“Peter would never risk my life,” Derek said immediately, with full and complete conviction. “Intentionally,” he added the qualifier a beat later. Since being a werewolf did naturally come with some dangers and not even Peter could account for everything.

Stiles didn't look fully convinced. “How do you know?”

“Because I do.”

_Because he's my heart mate. My soulmate_.

But that wasn't an explanation that would go down well. Years of therapy – being told that he'd been groomed, that he'd been abused, that he'd been taken advantage of, that his own experiences couldn't be trusted – weighed down on him. Humans didn't take well to being told that Derek would earnestly have committed suicide if his mother hadn't given in and told him he wasn't sick for wanting to be with his uncle.

Laura had never understood.

Rather than try to explain all of that, Derek stalked away from Stiles and towards another row of shelving and a different stack of books. He grabbed a thin volume from the middle, one he'd read himself after finally learning the existence of heart-mates. One his sister had been ordered to read when she wouldn't stop talking about calling the cops. It hadn't changed her mind, but at least it could explain the concept.

“Read that,” Derek instructed, shoving the book into Stiles' chest. “And stop Scott from going to dinner with the Argents. If you can't, I'll watch the house. I'll get him out of there if things go wrong.”

“I'm guessing this is my cue to get going, huh?” Stiles raised his eyebrows, giving Derek a judgemental look while he turned the book over in his hands. “Can I come back here?” he asked, following Derek back to the door that led out into the boiler room.

“You can try.” Derek paused to open the door, gesturing for the teen to go through in front of him. “It only opens for Hale claws,” he said once they were both through, the door closing behind them.

“Well that sucks. This doesn't count as an explanation, you know,” Stiles informed him, waving the book in his hand for emphasis. “You still need to tell me why I should trust your uncle.”

“Read the book, Stiles.”

“Is it an explanation of why I should trust your uncle?”

“Just read it.”


	8. Chapter Eight - Catastrophising

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Derek stews in resentment on a rooftop while Stiles is judgementally supportive. An altercation occurs. Later, Derek's thoughts spiral.

The Argent house was not difficult to find.

Wide driveway, good lines of sight from all the windows, a decently high fence surrounding the property to discourage trespassers. And a faint, pervasive smell of gun oil. There'd be a basement, Derek noted, looking at the house from a discrete perch on the roof of the house across the street. With a concrete floor. An armoury too – somewhere easily accessible but also easily explainable to guests and visitors. Sensors on the roof corners. Security cameras at all the points of egress.

He'd never seen a hunter's house before but he'd heard enough stories.

Predictably, irritatingly, Stiles had not been able to convince Scott to skip dinner with his girlfriend's parents.

In fact, according to Stiles' text – and Derek did not remember giving Stiles permission to text him – Scott seemed to think the whole thing about Allison and her family being hunters was some sort of line to get him to want to be part of Derek's pack. Somehow. However that worked.

Which meant that Derek was being forced to give up his evening to play babysitter in case it turned out that Scott's intended meal was a bullet. Or poison. A small enough dose of wolfsbane would make a human only mildly ill while still incapacitating a werewolf. It would be easy enough to slip something into the food, and Scott didn't have enough experience as a wolf to know the smell yet.

Of course, Derek was far enough away that he wouldn't be able to smell anything at all. The scents inside the Argent house were a mystery to him, and thanks to the limited amount of open curtains so were the sights. The first he'd know of any trouble was when he heard it. Which meant sitting and waiting and listening until either something happened or Scott left unharmed.

Whatever came first.

Honestly, Derek was of two minds about the whole endeavour.

On the one hand, Scott was a decent enough person. He didn't deserve being thrown head first into the supernatural, and he didn't deserve to have his life put in danger just by virtue of being bitten. He was a normal kid with normal kid ambitions – no normal kid should need to worry about his girlfriend's family possibly trying to kill him.

On the other hand, Scott had been warned and he'd chosen not to take that warning. He refused to believe that Allison or her family could possibly have any motive to hurt him, wilfully ignorant to the fact that hunters didn't need motive past the fact that he'd been bitten. He was reckless, and didn't seem to care to learn how to use his senses properly.

It actually made Derek angry to see how reckless he was.

He was resentful of it.

Resentful that he had to spend his evening looking out for a kid who didn't know any better than to walk into a hunter's den. Resentful that every time Scott risked losing control and mauling someone he also risked exposing Derek and Peter.

Scott wasn't even remotely interested in becoming pack and Derek was out there on a roof listening to him make out with his girlfriend. Stalking him to make sure he actually left the Argent house alive and unharmed.

Downstairs in the house Derek heard a door open and shut. A set of footsteps walked from carpet to tile – hallway to kitchen, he thought – and a voice he recognised as belonging to Chris Argent enquired as to the state of dinner.

Innocuous talk between husband and wife. Chris and Victoria Argent, talking about mashed potatoes.

Upstairs in a room on the other side of the house from Scott and his girlfriend, Kate Argent was doing something that required scraping metal against metal. Sharpening knives, maybe. Filing the base of a spoon into a shiv.

Knowing what he knew now it was hard to imagine her as a real person and not as some caricature of evil. Like the villain in a cartoon, Kate Argent was two dimensional in his mind. He knew, logically, that there had to be more to her as a person than just the hunter – the hatred she had to have for the supernatural that drove her to murder. There had to be more, but he just couldn't picture it.

He could remember bits and pieces about a smiling young teacher who tried too hard to be liked. A substitute who gave no homework and barely touched on any of what they were supposed to be learning in class. Derek had been annoyed by the lack of actual teaching in a subject he sometimes struggled with. Math that was more complicated than basic addition and subtraction wasn't something that came naturally to him.

Derek had been annoyed by her attitude and hadn't responded well to her attempts to befriend the class.

Laura, on the other hand, had fallen for the act.

Derek squeezed his eyes shut, counting down in his head to try and will away the anger that bubbled up thinking about Laura talking to Kate. Because without Laura, Kate would never have had her excuse. She might never have known what days the whole pack would be in the same place outside the full moon.

Maybe she still would have tried to kill them, but it would have been harder without Laura's helpful instruction.

Or was that going too far?

Thinking too ill of the dead.

If there was one thing Derek could say about his sister it was that she always had the best intentions at heart. It was just her execution that left a lot to be desired. Her stubborn refusal to see any point of view other than her own or to accept that reality might not be exactly the way she perceived it.

She must have thought she was reaching out for help in an impossible situation.

She must have hated their family so much for what she saw as letting a pedophile openly molest her brother.

Derek's phone, tucked away in the pocket of his brand new jacket, buzzed with an incoming text.

It jolted him out of his thoughts – a sudden shock to bring him back to the present.

He grabbed the phone from his pocket and looked at the screen, eyebrows coming together into a frown when it buzzed again in his hand. A string of texts coming in one after the other;

_ur mythology homework takes a weird turn_

_u kno u could have just told me_

_not that id have believed you_

_so thats a fair point_

_do u think allisn is scotts soulmate and thats why hes so dumb about her hunter fam???_

_also btw really weird u and ur uncle_

_no judgement_

_(total judgemtn)_

Derek rolled his eyes. “N-O,” he muttered as he typed his two letter reply.

_r u sure?_ Stiles replied barely five seconds later. _pretty sure I caught him looking t rings the other day_

'Teenagers are dumb', Derek typed with his thumbs, scowling down at the screen. 'He's infatuated. If they broke up he'd get over it. My grandmother killed herself when her husband died.'

_!!!_

_this convo suddenly got heavy_

_but yeah im pretty sure scott wouldnt commit suicide_

_hed write a lot of bad poems and maybe cry_

_but hed be more likely to try n win her back_

_I didnt kno how competitive he was until this whole wwolf thing_

_wwolf_

_abbreviation_

_not typo_

'It can bring out the worst in people', Derek sent back.

He thought a bit about that, trying to remember anything and everything about the bitten wolves from his past. Not much came to mind. He did remember Julie (had she been his cousin or his mother's cousin?) once saying something about feeling invincible until she figured out that being a werewolf came with its own set of pitfalls. Wolves were so much stronger and faster than humans that it could be hard to remember that they were still breakable, still fallible.

Scott might not be making much use of his senses, but he'd definitely discovered the strength and speed – healing too.

'At first.' Derek added, making an attempt at being fair. 'It will get better.'

A sudden shout from the Argent house snapped Derek's attention away from his phone. He shoved the device hastily back into his pocket and focused on the source of the noise. He could hear something ceramic break – plates maybe, shouting, several voices all at once jumbled together into word soup.

The wolf was out of the bag.

He jumped off the roof without a second's thought and crossed the street in several great loping strides. A moment later he crashed through the dining room window, glass shattering against his leather-covered forearms and crunching underneath his boots when he landed on the pristine white carpet.

It took only a split second for him to take in the scene. Like a snapshot imprinted on the back of his eyelids, he saw it all in the blink of an eye.

The dining room table was in disarray, a broken serving bowl shattered over perfectly presented meals of roast chicken. Adults stood around the table in perfect three-point formation, Victoria with a carving knife in one hand and a steak knife in the other, Chris aiming a small handgun designed for concealed carry, and Kate with a heavy pistol that smelled heavily of wolfsbane. Allison was backed away into a corner, staring at the scene with wide eyes and frozen with surprise or horror.

And there was Scott in full beta shift, remarkably in control for a newly bitten omega, simply standing there in the chaos looking as if he couldn't quite believe what was happening.

His eyes locked with Derek's, almost pleading.

Then the Argents were turning, instinct and training taking over at the shattering of their dining room window, and Derek leaped forward. “Go!” he shouted at Scott, slamming into Kate and forcing her aim wide just as she squeezed the trigger of her weapon.

Plaster dust fell from the ceiling. Derek's ears were ringing, everything else temporarily muffled.

He could hear Chris shouting his sister's name, felt the impact of several small calibre bullets hit his shoulder and back. Normal bullets, he noted distantly as he felt the wounds begin to heal even as his nerve endings screamed.

Footsteps passed him as he wrestled with Kate on the floor, trying to keep her wolfsbane bullets out of play (and out of his own body).

She was slippery though, writhing like an eel beneath him, kicking and scratching.

A line of fire scored against his stomach – a knife he hadn't seen digging into the meat of his belly. Derek grit his teeth against the pain and slammed her wrist against the floor. He didn't care if it broke as long as she couldn't shoot him.

Chris was shouting still, and then suddenly Derek's whole body locked up in pain, muscles spasming with the electricity running through him.

_Taser_ , he thought as he went down, vision growing fuzzy at the edges.

He'd forgotten about Victoria.

* * *

He regained consciousness a piece at a time. Like programs running on an old computer, his senses came back one by one in order of how much brain power they required to process.

The first thing Derek became aware of was a sense of vertigo. His body knew that regaining consciousness normally happened while lying down, but he couldn't feel anything solid against his back.

Something was pulling at his arms. It took him a moment to realise it was his own weight. After that he could feel the cuffs around his wrists and the wire against his back, feet and ankles touching cold concrete.

His mouth tasted of something metallic. Blood. A faint throbbing told him that he'd bitten his tongue recently and it hadn't quite healed yet.

Why hadn't it healed yet?

Scent filtered in next – somehow coming in before sound. He would have thought it'd be the other way around, there was always _so much_ sensory input when it came to smell.

Damp and mildew. Concrete dust. Rust. The smell of human that lingered in any enclosed space that regularly saw people coming and going. Familiar smells. Danger smells that brought to mind guns and poison. Ozone. Electricity!

Even a weak current would interrupt a werewolf's healing and he'd been hit by a hunter's taser, tailor made to bring down creatures like himself. Far stronger than anything that could be bought through legal channels.

Sound filtered in. The distant sound of someone speaking, too muffled by distance or soundproofing to make out properly. The buzz of something electric nearby. Footsteps. The voice was coming closer, becoming more distinct.

Derek got his feet under himself and stood, taking some of the pressure off his arms. He blinked his eyes open and glared against the sudden brightness. Electric stand lights, the kind found on building sites, were trained on him at forty-five degree angles – one in each of the two corners of the room that he could see. He looked around, taking in the bare concrete walls, the table by the doorway, the generator in the corner and the cables that ran to the wire fence that he'd been strapped to.

“Well look who's awake.”

Kate Argent appeared in the black hole of the doorway, a smile curling her lips. She strode into the room, stopping a few inches short of arm's length from the fence where Derek was hanging. “Don't be shy, Allison,” she called back over her shoulder to the girl hovering in the doorway, “it can't hurt you. Not when it's like this.”

Allison hesitated, then stepped forward into the room, her face like a mask despite the red rim around her eyes.

“See,” Kate instructed, a teacher's voice that made Derek's gut coil in repulsion, “this is what a werewolf looks like most of the time.” She moved forward just one step, leaning in far too close for his liking. “Looks harmless, huh? Well he's not,” she said flatly, and flicked a switch on the generator.

White hot pain seared through Derek's body, the muscles in his back and arms tensing with sudden involuntary spasms as the electricity surged through him. He felt his face change, felt the claws digging into his palms – the change just as involuntary as the muscle spasms – and bared his fangs in a roar of pain.

Seconds later it stopped, the flow of electricity cut off again.

Derek's muscles unlocked and he sagged, panting, glaring at the hunter through eyes that glowed blue.

“This is what they really look like,” Kate continued, “underneath the mask. _This_ is what they are. And this one, with his pretty blue eyes, is a murderer. That's what the blue eyes mean, isn't it?” she leaned in, her smile a razor blade. “Even amongst their own kind this one's considered a monster.”

Kate turned to face her niece and Derek shifted his glare to the teenager. She was looking at him, her face impassive. She stared at his brow ridges and fangs, at the coarse hair on the sides of his face. Not at his eyes.

He stared into hers, issuing her a silent challenge to meet his gaze.

Pleading was useless. Derek knew better than to try and make anyone feel sorry for the monster chained up in the basement. But if he could make her feel the least bit uncomfortable then he would.

“Your parents didn't want to tell you because they thought you were better off not knowing the horrors of the world,” Kate was telling her niece. “They wanted you to be normal, as if not knowing about something means it can't hurt you. If they'd actually told you you might've been prepared when it turned out your _boyfriend_ was one of them.”

Allison looked away from them both, her scent turning sour with emotion.

“Scott,” Derek croaked, tongue clumsy around his fangs.

Allison's back snapped straight. Her eyes met his, something vulnerable hiding there.

“Did he –”

“No talking,” Kate snapped. Her hand flicked out and hit the switch for the electricity again, strangling the words in his throat before they could get out. “You don't get to talk to her!”

Blood dripped from the wounds Derek's claws dug into his palms, his hands forced into fists by the current running through him. It ran down his arms, sizzling where it touched the electrified wire. The smell saturated the air – cooked meat and burning metal, scorched hair.

Allison's mask cracked, her lips quivering. “I can't be here,” she said, backing away first one step and then another, back towards the doorway. “I can't be here,” she repeated, her voice strange. Then she was gone, fleeing out the door and down the hall.

Or up the stairs. Or wherever the door led to.

“Allison!” Kate called after her. She hit the switch, probably just so he didn't fry for too long and die while she wasn't there to see it, and hurried out after the teen.

Derek sagged against the wire, sore and weak. The muscles in his back were twitching, his fingers slow to uncurl when he tried them. He moved slowly, using the fence for support for his weight, and smothered a slightly hysterical laugh when his legs threatened to collapse beneath him.

Caught by hunters.

Derek squeezed his eyes shut, turning his head to the side to rest his forehead against his arm.

Of course he was. Of fucking course he was.

Whatever reprieve he'd felt since Laura's death, whatever sick sense of relief, was coming back to bite him. All he could do was hope that Peter didn't wind up with the same black hole in his chest that Derek used to live with. That maybe Peter could save him, or if Derek died that he wouldn't choose to follow him.

They hadn't even gotten to be together. Not really. Just stolen moments in a hospital room. A few scant nights of kisses and curling up together on a too-small bed to weigh against six years of a nightmare.

They'd never gotten to be happy.

Derek laughed – a broken, horrible sound. He felt the beta shift melt away, his eyes stinging with unshed tears.

When had he ever really gotten to be happy? Age fifteen, a handful of days after a ritual in the back room of a vet up until a few months before his birthday. That's when he'd been happy. Properly, truly happy.

Everything else was tinted with grief, shame, and anger. His three constant companions since the time he was old enough to understand that family members didn't love one another the way he loved his uncle. Frustration, self loathing, self destruction. He used to get so tired of arguing, but he couldn't let it go either – he couldn't let Laura think that she'd finally beaten it into him that those few months of happiness had actually been abuse.

Why should he fight anymore if it was just going to be more of the same?

What was the point of it – the black, sucking hole in his chest and the constant burning anger – just to die in a hunter's basement without Peter there to hold him?

Why did other people get to be happy?


	9. Chapter Nine - Burn Out

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Derek is emotionally and physically exhausted and not well equipped for conversation. Later, Stiles performs a daring rescue and unloads a surprising amount of exposition in a relatively short time.

Without windows or clocks to mark the passing of time, Derek didn't know how long he hung there in the basement. Time was fickle. It stretched and contracted according to its own whims. It had been evening when he'd first lost consciousness in the chaos of the Argent's formal dining room. How long had it been since then?

Long enough that his wounds had healed. Even the deep self-inflicted punctures made by his claws had finally healed, the blood that had dripped down his arms dried and flaking. His stomach itched with blood from the knife wound to his gut – the injury long gone, but the evidence left behind on his skin in red-brown smears.

His arms ached, his shoulders cramped after too long in one position. Hunger gnawed at him, his body pleading for fuel to replace the energy it had expended keeping him alive and unmarked by his injuries.

He must have slept, because he remembered waking up again.

Somehow fallen asleep from sheer exhaustion while hanging upright from an electrified fence.

The lights were off, the basement room in darkness that even his shifted wolf's eyes had difficulty piercing. Derek blinked, adjusting the set of his weight and cocking his head to the side to listen. He could hear footsteps, the faint sound of thick soles against concrete, and knew what it was that had woken him up.

The lights turned on, blinding after the darkness, and Derek squinted against the harshness to make out to figure in the doorway.

Male, tall, wearing clothes that could easily conceal a dozen different weapons. Chris Argent, watching him from across the room with a face just as impassive as his daughter's had been.

For a long time, or what felt like a long time, the man just stared at him without saying anything.

Taking him in, assessing the cuffs around his wrists that bound him to the fence and the way Derek had braced himself against it – using the source of his pain as support. There was almost something poetic about that.

“My daughter is convinced that Scott is innocent in all of this,” Chris said after the silence had gone long past uncomfortable. “I looked into him when she started talking about dating. By all accounts he was a good kid. It'd be a shame to have to do something about him.”

“So he got away,” Derek observed flatly.

He was both glad that Scott got to avoid experiencing hunter hospitality and resentful of it. He wondered if Scott even knew what he'd saved the teen from, or if he blamed Derek for escalating the situation.

“He got away,” Chris confirmed, giving nothing away with his voice or his facial expressions. Even his scent was infuriatingly neutral. A true professional, schooling his emotions in order to interact with the enemy on a 'level' field.

Or as level as things could be with one party chained to a torture device.

“Good.”

Chris didn't react to Derek's blunt single word comment past a long, slow stare. “If I were to ask Scott how he became a werewolf,” he said eventually, “what would he say? Would he say he'd been given a choice?”

Derek debated remaining silent. Whatever he said, the odds were good the hunter would assume he was lying. Their information on werewolves might not be fully accurate, but they always seemed to get one thing right – they always assumed that a wolf would do anything to protect their pack.

And since Derek had saved Scott, the Argents would naturally be assuming that Scott was part of that pack. That Derek had saved him because of pack ties, not out of some ridiculous sense of obligation.

“What do you want?” Derek demanded of the hunter, the wire fence rattling as he shifted his weight again. “You want to know about Scott? My alpha bit him, but he's not pack. He's not part of this.”

“By 'this' you mean the murder of innocent people?”

Derek snorted. “Right. Innocent.”

Chris raised his eyebrows slightly. “A bus driver,” he listed, “a video store clerk, a couple of guys doing community service. Unconnected people who were just going about their lives -”

“Unconnected,” Derek repeated the word with a sarcastic chuckle.

“What exactly did they do to incite your alpha's wrath?” Chris pressed. “What could people like that have possibly done to deserve being ripped apart, stuffed in oil barrels, skin shredded? Your alpha is deranged,” Chris continued, much to Derek's incredulity. “Help us stop him, and you'll be doing the right thing.”

“The _right thing_?” Derek parroted. He rolled his eyes. “Like hunters do the right thing.”

“We protect people. Without us, werewolves like your alpha would have no-one to stop them.”

“And werewolves like my baby sister would still be alive!”

Derek's mouth snapped shut. He braced for the expected pain, gritting his teeth and waiting for the hunter to flip the switch that would electrify the fence. A second later and nothing had happened. Chris was just standing there, looking at him with his unreadable face and the tiniest curl of surprise in his scent.

“She was eleven,” Derek continued. “My cousin Angela was human, she was _nine_. What were you stopping them from? My family lived in this town for generations without hurting anyone, what did we do to deserve being burned alive?”

“You can't blame –”

“Who? Hunters? _Humans_?” Derek snorted, all of the anger and the pain that he'd been keeping locked inside bubbling suddenly to the surface. If he was going to die, he wasn't going to die letting his killers spout hypocrisy at him. If he was going to die, he wasn't going to let Chris Argent feed him bullshit. “Your sister's a great hunter. How long did she have to plan to become our substitute teacher? How long did it take her to get the rest of them on board? She had everything planned. The insurance adjuster, the arsonists, she even had a get away driver in case someone saw the smoke and called nine-one-one. She knew about the tunnels. She knew how to get close. She knew when everyone would be home because she got my sister to tell her! But I'm sure we deserved it, right?”

Derek laughed, and even to his own ears it sounded broken. “We deserved it because we're werewolves! We deserve to die and Kate Argent deserves to live. Because she's fucking human. So just kill me!” Derek shouted, tugging at the cuffs that bound him. “Just kill me! Pat yourself on the back and put me out of my fucking misery!”

Chris just stood there. Staring, just staring. Watching him from his high horse across the concrete dungeon.

“Christ.” Derek let his head fall back against the wire.

He felt wrung out, squeezed dry until the only thing left was the ache – deep and yawning, a chasm in his soul that wanted desperately for his heart mate to come and hold him and tell him everything would be alright. But it wouldn't be. He was a freak of nature, a mistake made by the universe. A bit of sickness in an otherwise beautiful tapestry. If he'd never been born (if he'd only loved Peter the way a nephew was supposed to love his uncle) then everything would have been alright.

His eyes wouldn't be blue. His family would still be alive.

_Not a healthy way to think_ , he thought to himself tiredly.

Kate was the kind of hunter who only needed an excuse to justify her actions to others. She would've found a way to get to them regardless.

Chris turned and left, his footsteps echoing against the concrete long after he was gone. He'd left the lights on and a faint swirl of acrid uncertainty in the air.

* * *

Once upon a time, when Derek was younger, one of his favourite places had been out in the preserve by the creek. Far enough away from the house that it was private, but close enough that a howl could easily summon help if it was needed. He'd spent a lot of time there with Peter, when they weren't hanging out together in Peter's ridiculously sexy car or sitting together on one of the couches while Peter read and Derek watched TV.

He loved that creek.

He could still remember Peter's look of surprise that time after he'd come back from college – when they'd raced to the creek on the full moon and Peter had crashed into the water before he could stop himself. The way his uncle had come out of the water looking like a wet cat, clothes clinging to his body. He'd had wet dreams about that night. Had jerked off while imagining what could have happened if Jonathan hadn't come and told them to get back to the house.

There was always such a sense of peace there in the gentle chuckle of the water.

When Dr Kepler told him to imagine a happy place, that's where Derek's mind had gone. To the creek. To the sound of the water and the wind in the treetops. To his uncle's smile – that one that crinkled his eyes that he never gave to anyone but him – as they sat together on the bank.

That's where Derek was now.

He wasn't in his body, which was hanging limply in a plain concrete room underground, he was there by the creek. He could hear the water, the gentle rustling of leaves overhead, drowning the faint buzz of electricity from the lights and the generator. The sunlight filtered down through the branches, bringing a comfortable warmth to the afternoon.

He was alone, but he knew he wouldn't be that way for long.

Peter was coming soon.

Back in the real world Derek's body twitched, responding to the sound of footsteps coming closer. The noise filtered in through the daydream, dragging him slowly and reluctantly back to the harshly lit basement with its wire fence and cold concrete floor. He blinked muzzily, part of him wanting to stay in the dream where everything was calm and safe but a more insistent part of him stubbornly continued to drag him away, convinced that it was better to be awake to face whatever was coming.

The last time someone had come down for him it was Kate. She hadn't stayed long, just enough to shock him a few times and monologue about eradicating the world of monsters.

By the time she left, probably less than ten minutes after she'd come in, he was so goddamn tired of hearing her talk.

These weren't her footsteps though. In fact, Derek frowned slightly, they didn't sound like they belonged to a hunter at all. They were too heavy, too quick to belong to someone who felt like they were in control the way that hunters always seemed to.

He stared at the doorway, willing whoever it was to just appear and was rewarded a few seconds later by Stiles of all people appearing from the gloom, a pair of bolt cutters hanging from one hand and a phone in the other.

“Oh shit,” Stiles exclaimed, sounding both surprised and relieved, “there you are! These tunnels are frickin' ridiculous, man, I was starting to think I was going in circles! I mean, I'm pretty sure that was just my perception since I don't think I ever actually turned a corner or anything -”

“Stiles,” Derek growled, his voice a hoarse croak.

“Right! Okay, yeah,” Stiles darted forward with the bolt cutters. “Time to get you out of here.”

The teen paused at the last second, stopping to eye the set up with the cables and the generator. His eyebrows raised. With short, anxious movements Stiles hastily unhooked the cables from the wire of the fence, letting the ends drop to the floor with a clatter. With that done, he hoisted the bolt cutters and snipped first one cuff free and then the other.

Derek dropped like a bag full of bricks. He caught himself at the last second, landing in a crouch on the concrete floor. His arms felt like lead weights, shoulders screaming in protest after having been locked in place for so long. He waved Stiles away, the teen having reached forward to help him up, and forced himself to stand.

His first step forward was rough, and he wound up leaning on Stiles' shoulder anyway, having flashbacks to being shot and having the teen help him walk then too.

“Tunnels?” Derek asked, squinting ahead into the dark beyond the doorway.

“Yeah,” Stiles replied, his voice echoing off the walls a little. “That's part of why it took so long to find you,” he said as they shuffled out of the room, Derek's steps slowly becoming surer as his legs got used to moving again. “I tracked your phone, by the way,” he added, holding up the phone he'd had in his hands earlier – Derek's phone, miraculously clinging to life at five percent. “Which was not as easy as they make it look in the movies. Anyway, I thought maybe they'd just dumped your phone until your uncle told me about the tunnels under the house.”

The tunnels under the house.

Derek almost physically stumbled as it hit him where exactly he'd been all that time. In the tunnels under his old house, dug out and repurposed by the Argents. How long had it taken them to do, he wondered. Had the fence and the generator been there when he was sleeping upstairs in the burnt out remains of the house, or had they done it after he left? If he'd stayed just one more night would they have found him there?

Anger burned in his chest, giving him a burst of hate-fuelled adrenaline that had him square his shoulders and clench his fists, biting back a barely audible growl.

“Yeah,” Stiles said drily, “that's about the same reaction he had too.”

“Where is he?” Derek asked, leading the way out to the trap door in the basement floor – the charred old wooden panel door recently replaced with shiny new steel. He burst out into the basement and made for the stairs that led up to the first floor, taking the steps two at a time.

“Hey!” Stiles yelped and followed, hurrying up the stairs behind him. “He's – slow down – he's not here!”

Derek stopped dead, turning on his heel to snarl at the teen.

Stiles held up his hands, backing up a step to show that he wasn't a threat. “Hey, hey, calm down, I can explain this – let me explain this? He's out in the woods,” Stiles said, his tone bordering on soothing and missing the mark only because being face to face with a snarling werewolf was clearly making him nervous, “we had to draw the hunters away before we could get to you. They had guards stationed at the house, other guards, not just the Argents, hired goons or whatever. Your uncle took care of them so I could sneak in and get you. He's going to meet us at the hospital later once he's, uh, taken care of stuff. Okay? He wanted to be here,” Stiles added, slowly lowering his hands, “but he had to take care of the guards first.”

Taken care of stuff probably meant disposing of the bodies.

Derek's shoulders slumped. “Fine. Lets go,” he said tiredly, “before Kate comes back.”

“Yeah,” Stiles said, drawing the word out into two slowly drawled syllables, “about that...”

“What is it?”

“She may or may not have been arrested temporarily?”

Derek stopped moving again, abruptly enough that Stiles bounced off his back. “Seriously?” Derek asked, not quite able to believe that someone like Kate Argent would allow herself to be caught doing anything that could possibly lead to arrest.

Stiles rubbed the back of his neck. “So, I may have called in an anonymous tip about unregistered firearms and illegal ammunition?”

Derek shook his head. “And that's why he likes you,” he muttered to himself.

He didn't say anything else until he was sitting in the front seat of Stiles' truly hideous ancient blue jeep, his bare chest and bloodstained arms covered up by a blanket the teen happened to have in the back.

“What happened?”

Two words, a loaded question.

Stiles looked away from the road to glance at him briefly, an uncomfortable sort of look on his face. “Uh...”

“Obviously I was down there for a while,” Derek continued, staring resolutely out the front window. “I know Scott got away. What happened?”

“He, uh, yeah, he got away. And then he went home and...” Stiles pursed his lips and blew out a sigh. “He didn't say anything about what happened,” he admitted after a moment. “He told me the day after at school because I asked how the whole dinner thing went. I think maybe he thought you got away? So it wasn't a big deal? I mean, he was pretty upset about what happened but he didn't mention anything about you _not_ getting away so I just assumed that everything went okay... You know, aside from the whole window-smashing rescue thing and the Argents knowing for sure that my best friend is definitely a werewolf...”

Stiles glanced at him again and Derek nodded slightly to prompt him to keep going, his lips clamped tightly shut.

“Anyway, so that night your uncle showed up at my house. Just, like, let himself in through the window. He was seriously worried when you didn't show up during visiting hours, he made me call Scott and go over what happened again and then he said he was going to go check out the Argents house and see for himself. I don't know what happened exactly but he showed up again at like three in the morning and said you'd been taken and somehow – was he by any chance a conman in a previous life, by the way? – _somehow_ convinced me that I had to help him find you.”

“Lawyer.”

“What?” Stiles blinked, shooting Derek a confused look before quickly looking back at the road.

“Peter went to law school. He was a lawyer.”

“Okay, well, that explains a lot.” Stiles shook his head. “It took a while,” he continued the explanation in the same breath, the transition back into the story oddly jarring. “To figure out where you were. I actually tried to corner Allison at school to talk to her but she kept giving me the slip. I don't think she's totally on board with her family's thing,” he mused, “she was looking pretty jumpy and like she hadn't slept in a couple of days.”

“Didn't stop her from letting Kate torture me,” Derek said flatly.

“Yeah...”

They made a turn and suddenly Beacon Hills Memorial was right in front of them. Stiles parked the jeep in the visitor parking out the back, then told Derek to wait in the car while he got some things. He was gone five minutes, then reappeared with a wheelchair, oversized scrubs hastily thrown on over his clothes.

“Nurse-lady is running interference,” Stiles told him, presenting the chair with a flourish, “but we've gotta be quick. Anyone sees us from a distance they're going to think you're just another patient. Plus you don't have to walk.”

“I'm fine,” Derek protested, even as he stumbled a little getting out of the jeep.

“Sure, big guy. Whatever helps you sleep at night.”

Reluctantly, hating how it made him feel, Derek sat in the chair and let himself be wheeled into the hospital and through the mostly-empty corridors of the long term care ward. It was an odd time of night, some time after visiting hours were over but not quite late enough for the overnight shift to be on duty yet.

Thinking about that the timeline suddenly clicked.

He'd been in that concrete basement for two days, starved and electrified and healing from not-insignificant injuries. No wonder he felt weak.

“Scott didn't help,” Derek said abruptly, suddenly putting his finger on why the first half of Stiles' story had left a sour taste in his mouth. “After he knew what happened.”

“Scott didn't help,” Stiles confirmed humourlessly.

When they got to room sixteen it was empty still, though being in a place that smelled so thoroughly of Peter (and antiseptic cleaning agents) was still soothing. The first thing Derek did when they were safely shut into the room was make a beeline for the bathroom. He gulped water straight from the tap, not even bothering to find a cup, then used the sink to wash the dried blood from his hands and arms.

He showered while he waited for Peter to get back, and dressed in a pair of scrubs that Jennifer dropped off for him.

Stiles was still there when he emerged, sitting in the visitor's chair and playing with his phone.

Derek hesitated, then crossed the room and sat down on the hospital bed, the one place in the room where Peter's scent was the strongest. He dug his fingers into the thin hospital blanket, twisting until it felt tight. He knew, in that way that he'd known it when Laura died, that Peter was alright. It was just that waiting for him, waiting for the end of whatever it was his heart mate was out there doing, still felt like too much distance between them.

“He offered me the bite,” Stiles piped up suddenly, watching Derek over the top of his phone. “Peter – he – he offered me the bite...”

_I figured he might_ , Derek thought, _you were the one he meant to bite in the first place_. Saying so didn't feel right though. Instead he just stared back at the teen for a moment until it became clear that Stiles wanted some sort of a response. “Yeah?” he grunted finally.

“I, uh, I turned him down?” Stiles winced, as if he thought it might be a decision warranting disapproval or disbelief.

“Good.”

“Good?” The teen both looked and sounded surprised.

“You don't have to be wolf to be pack.”

“I'm pack?” Stiles asked, again looking surprised but also not sure if he should be pleased or if he should possibly be calling the nearest adult to come rescue him.

Derek shrugged. “You could be. You helped save me.” He paused then, cocking his head to the side slightly. “You should go,” he told Stiles, then clarified a moment later when the teen looked uncertain; “Peter's coming. Privacy is a good idea.”

“Yeah,” Stiles stood hastily.

“Thanks,” Derek said when the teen was already half way through the door. “For helping. You didn't have to.”

An awkward smile wobbled for a moment on the teenager's lips. “Yeah, well, clean consciences, right? I'll see you later.”

“Later,” Derek agreed, though his brain wasn't quite working well enough to parse the underlying implications.

Then suddenly Peter was there – and his arms were wrapped around him – and his scent was in Derek's nose – and they were breathing each other's breath.

It felt like home.

It felt like such a _relief_.

Derek felt himself dissolve, two days worth of exhaustion crashing over him at once as his body finally told him it was safe. Alpha was here, alpha would protect him. His soulmate was holding him, soothing hands stroking softly over his back and through his hair.

“It's over, duckling,” Peter murmured against his lips, “it's over. I'm waking up tomorrow. It's all over. You never have to be alone again – I'll never let you be alone again.”


	10. Chapter Ten - Prognosis/Progression

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Peter finally gets officially released from the hospital and finally gives Derek the exposition that he's been missing. Later they make plans for the future.

Derek got the call some time close to noon.

He'd been sitting in the car, parked out by the preserve near the hiking trails – staring out the windshield at the trees. He hadn't been able to sleep much the night before, not after he'd had to leave the hospital in favour of going 'home' to his motel room. He couldn't be there when Peter 'woke up', after all. Not if he didn't want to answer uncomfortable questions about how he'd gotten in after visiting hours and why he was dressed in scrubs (why those jeans had blood stains on them).

As much as he'd wanted to stay, his being there would have only complicated things.

So he'd left, reluctantly, and gone to try and sleep.

He hadn't had as much success with that as he would have liked.

Derek answered the call mechanically, his 'hello' a robotic croak.

“Hello,” the voice on the other end of the line replied politely, “this is Caroline, I'm an administrator at Beacon Hills Memorial. Am I speaking with Derek Hale?”

“Yes,” Derek answered, sitting up a little straighter. He knew what the call was about but he could still feel his heart beat speed up in anticipation. “How can I – how can I help you?” he asked, trying to keep his tone casual. Like he didn't already have a good idea of what Caroline was going to say.

“I'm calling because you're listed as the next of kin for a patient here, Peter Hale, is that right?”

“Yes. Is – is something wrong?” Derek asked, his voice cracking on the last word. Because he knew nothing was wrong. He knew what was coming. And he couldn't bear the waiting.

“No. No, quite the opposite,” Caroline was quick to reassure, “I'm actually calling because...”

She continued to speak. Derek knew she did, but if he were asked to repeat what she'd said he wouldn't have been able to. He yessed and mm-hmed his way through her explanation, making all the right noises that someone in his position ought to make when a relative formally diagnosed with acute catatonia suddenly became responsive.

Two hours later, against the advice of doctors, Derek helped Peter sign himself out of the long term care ward for good.

He was officially an outpatient, expected to come back for check up appointments and psychological evaluation, but that wasn't something they could enforce without having him committed. And based on preliminary tests, aside from the burning desire to leave the hospital, Peter Hale was fully in his right mind.

“Little do they know,” Peter had muttered while signing forms, quietly enough that nobody without supernatural hearing would have heard. Derek had needed to fake a cough in order to hide his snort.

He'd been wheeled out of the long term care ward and to Derek's car in the parking lot by a nurse who looked simultaneously baffled by his recovery and disapproving of his decision to leave. He'd let Derek move him from the chair to the front passenger seat to keep up appearances, the nurse watching to make sure they didn't need help.

“Goodbye, Gladys,” Peter had waved at the nurse quite cheerfully. “I won't miss the sponge baths.”

The drive from the hospital back to Derek's motel room was filled with comfortable silence and frequently exchanged glances. Peter looked almost exultant, the satisfaction clear even on the scarred side of his face. He grinned at his nephew, scar tissue folding uncomfortably to accommodate the expression, and set his hand on the younger wolf's knee. A role reversal from back when it was Peter behind the wheel of his Aston Martin and Derek grinning at him from the passenger seat.

“So,” Derek said only when they were safely behind the locked door of his motel room. Alone at last in a place that wasn't a hospital room, curtains drawn, as close to true privacy as they'd ever get outside a place of their own. “I take it she's dead then?”

“As a doornail,” Peter agreed with a smile. He stretched, arms above his head, exposing a thin strip of skin above the pyjama pants that were tied low on his hips. He let his arms drop and rolled his neck, and when he looked at Derek next his scars had started to recede from the side of his mouth, his grin a little sharper than before. “I'm sure it's not the last we'll hear about it, but I for one feel much better after having decapitated the bitch.”

“There's no repercussions coming?” Derek asked, which was really the only thing he was worried about aside from the way his uncle was starting to look – like his old self, skin perfect and unmarred, blue eyes bright and full of mirth, smile just this side of wicked...

“Not right now,” Peter shrugged, dismissive of future problems. He stepped forward, his hands sliding around Derek's waist. He tilted his head up and paused with his mouth just centimetres from Derek's own. “I always knew you'd be taller than me,” he murmured, “did I ever tell you that?”

“It's two inches,” Derek replied, suddenly not sure what to do with his hands, “you'll live.”

“I like it. And I like this...” Peter pushed upwards slightly, slotting their mouths together into a kiss that felt like it had been a long time coming.

A _real_ kiss – different than the others they'd shared since Derek's return to Beacon Hills – better, more complete without the odd texture of scar tissue at the corner of his mouth. Derek breathed through his nose, opening his lips to his uncle's kiss and pushing back against the pressure. His hands landed on Peter's shoulders, then smoothed down the sides of his arms and around to his back, holding him close the way he always wanted to.

Peter's teeth closed on his bottom lip, firm but gentle. He pulled back, releasing Derek's lip only to swipe his tongue across the seam of his mouth, clever hands sliding up underneath the younger man's shirt.

The touch of skin on skin sent a shiver down Derek's spine, the sensation chased by sudden and insistent _want_. A feeling almost like desperation, a visceral need to be closer. To touch, to taste, to get his hands and his mouth on any part of the older wolf's body that he could reach. He could smell it in the air, the start of a feedback loop as his own arousal sparked an answer in Peter's scent that was so utterly delicious it made his mouth water, jeans growing tight as his cock swelled.

Peter growled, a deep rumbling noise that started in his chest and vibrated through his throat. He nipped at Derek's mouth again, his hands dipping down to cup his nephew's ass. Pulled together, Derek could feel his uncle's erection against his thigh through layers of denim, his own pressed against Peter's hip, trapped in an unforgiving cage of underwear and jeans.

“Is this too fast, duckling?”

Derek's laugh was more air than noise, breathless and giddy. “It's been six years, Peter. I would've let you fuck me in grade school.”

“That should not turn me on,” Peter chuckled, scraping his teeth against Derek's jaw. He shoved the younger wolf away the, backing up a couple of steps to put some distance between them. “Undress,” he instructed, the edges of his irises gone alpha-red, hands already lifting the hem of his own shirt. “I want to see you.”

Derek hurried to comply, the loss of his uncle's body against his own like a physical ache in his chest. He stripped off his shirt in one quick move, pulling it up over his head and ruffling his hair in the process. His pants were next – fumbling the belt buckle as he watched his uncle shrug out of his shirt – shoved down his thighs before he realised he needed his boots off or they'd get stuck at his ankles.

Peter watched him bend down to take his shoes off with hungry eyes, his own feet already bare of the hospital-issue socks and slippers he'd been wearing before.

With anyone else he might have felt self conscious being looked at that way, his body being taken in so obviously, but with Peter there was no awkward self-awareness. Only an excited thrill of knowing that finally ( _finally)_ they were going to see one another like this.

Boots out of the way, Derek kicked his jeans off and then froze with his hands paused at the waistband of his boxer briefs.

He stared at his uncle, the other man suddenly naked and stepping delicately out of the soft fabric puddled on the floor. He could feel his mouth drop open slightly, throat suddenly dry. It was like every wet dream he'd ever had in his life had coalesced into reality – a perfect amalgamation of every feature he found attractive in a man on display right in front of him.

Peter's body was lean, his stomach flat, waist slender and leading into a perfect vee at his hips. His shoulders and arms were thick with muscle, the kind born of real strength and not vanity, thighs powerful. Hair covered his chest, the same colour as his head, tapering into a stripe down his stomach that led perfectly to the trail down from his belly button to his pubic hair. And then his cock – uncut, like Derek's was, curving upward towards his belly, a hint of moisture glistening at the tip.

And, he couldn't but notice, pretty much the perfect size. Not ridiculously large, but proportionately so. Exactly what Derek would have chosen if he'd been picking something out of a catalogue. (Exactly what he would have gone for if he'd ever had the guts to buy himself a dildo while living under the same roof as his sister.)

He swallowed with an audible click and dragged his eyes back up to his uncle's face, not even the tiniest bit embarrassed to see the smug curve to Peter's lips.

“Now you, darling,” Peter prompted, reminding Derek that he was still standing there with his underwear on, erection straining against the fabric.

“Shit,” Derek breathed, and hastily got rid of his boxer briefs.

He stood there for a moment, figuring it was only fair that he give Peter the opportunity to look the way he had. Despite his impatience, the itch he felt to get his hands on skin, it was worth it to see the way the red in his uncle's eyes intensified – flaring to a proper crimson as his gaze dragged down Derek's body.

He wondered if the other wolf felt the same way that he did, like he was every one of Peter's fantasies come to life.

They came together like magnets, drawn together with irresistible force.

Somehow they wound up on the bed, messing up the covers as they shifted and rolled, everything a tangle of limbs and hands and lips and tongues until finally Derek was on his back with Peter above him straddling one of his thighs. They didn't even attempt anything more complicated than rutting against one another, using precome and spit to make it wet and easy. They could do it properly next time, or later, after the urgency was gone and there was time to think about preparation and lube. This time it was just Peter's cock dragging back and forth against his skin, his own trapped between their bellies, hands clutching tight against shoulders and back and breathless open-mouthed kisses.

Peter came first, the look on his face and the smell of his come almost enough for Derek to follow straight after. He was close, close enough that when Peter reached between them he came before his uncle could do more than wrap his hand around him.

There was a pause as they each caught their breath, a moment where things could easily have started before the mood shifted to something quieter and more content.

Slowly, moving one body part at a time, Peter moved until he was lying on the bed beside his nephew rather than sitting on top of him. He turned on his side, head pillowed on Derek's bicep, and slid his leg over the younger wolf's thigh, careless of any stickiness or mess.

Derek curled his arm so he could rest his hand against Peter's back, sort-of holding him with the arm that he was lying on. He sank back against the mattress with a sigh, feeling _full_ in a way he hadn't in a long time, like the scar from the black hole in his chest had finally healed over. He turned his head slightly, watching Peter raise his come-covered hand and contemplate it a moment before wiping it off on the cover.

“Not gonna taste?” Derek asked, come-drunk and full of endorphins or he might not have said anything.

“Not when it's growing cold,” Peter responded, sounding amused. “I'll wait until you come in my mouth.”

“I've never given a blowjob,” Derek mused, finding patterns in the popcorn ceiling. “I've wanted to suck you off since I knew it was something people could do. I think I was ten.” A beat. “I was kind of a fucked up kid.”

Peter made a choking noise that could have been laughter. “Birds of a feather,” he said drily, sarcastic good humour heavy in his tone. “I was fantasising about a grown-up version of you when you were seven. I wanted to murder your play dates.”

“Good thing you didn't. It would've sucked to visit you in jail.”

“Duckling, you think they would have even found the bodies?”

“When you were seventeen? Probably.”

“Probably,” Peter agreed, “but just so you're aware, I've improved a lot since then. Not that I ever actually killed anyone back then, it's just that I've had a bit of practice recently and I've come to discover that I'm pretty good at it.”

“So no play dates?” Derek teased, grinning. He should probably be concerned about how talk about murder seemed to count as playful banter now.

“Not without me.”

“You think I'm ever going to have play dates without you?”

* * *

They spent the better part of the afternoon in bed. It felt like making up for lost time – for all of the years they hadn't been able to touch, or talk, or just be close to one another. There was less sex than Derek might have expected, though by the time the sun went down the sheets were thoroughly stained with sweat and semen and the bed may never be the same again. Peter talked a lot, catching him up on what he'd missed while chained up in the basement room the Argents had misappropriated from their family and explaining exactly why he was so confident there would be no immediate trouble from that quarter.

As it turned out, some time between stalking the Argent house to find out what had happened to Derek and mopping up after Kate and her guards were dead, Peter had managed to strike a deal with Chris and Victoria.

A reluctant deal on the part of the hunters, but still a deal.

Essentially, the killing stopped with Kate. There would be no retaliation, a bargain Peter was only able to strike because of some legal leverage acquired from Derek's kidnap and torture. Apparently Kate had been arrogant enough, or paranoid enough, to record Allison's trip to the dungeon with her. The video showed Derek being electrocuted and tortured while the teenager watched, and while it probably wasn't enough evidence to have her arrested for anything (especially since Derek didn't have a scratch on him), making the video public could destroy Allison's future as well as the Argent's reputation in Beacon Hills.

He'd sent the video to Chris as soon as he'd found it, and then sent it to Stiles with instructions to copy it to a hard drive or flash drive for a back up.

Under the threat of blackmail – or 'persuasive measures', as Peter termed it – the remaining Argents had been forced to agree not to come after Derek, himself, or any future pack they may acquire.

“Without provocation,” Peter clarified with a laugh, “though they'll have to weigh it against release the video anyway.”

“Future pack,” Derek repeated the phrase back to his uncle, eyebrows drawn together slightly into a small frown. “Is that what we're going to do, build a pack?”

It wasn't... It wasn't something Derek had given any thought to. His first pack had been his family, and once they were dead it had just been him and Laura – a pack of two, their dynamic unhealthy in ways that would have been concerning even if they'd been completely human.

The truth was that lone wolves didn't do well. Even those who could maintain their grip on humanity suffered from it, becoming weaker than other wolves, healing slower, feeling the grip of the moon squeeze tighter with each passing year.

And it was worse for alphas. An alpha with a single beta might scrape by, but it was by no means ideal.

How Laura had done it for so long was a mystery. Maybe, underneath the well-adjusted, functional shell that she'd built for herself, she'd been just as screwed up as he was.

“I thought we might find a place to live first,” Peter replied easily, though he was clearly watching his nephew for any signs of unease. Seeing none, he leaned in an pressed a kiss against the younger wolf's jaw. “I was thinking somewhere private. Large windows, excellent water pressure. What do you think?”

“I think... we'll need somewhere for training,” Derek said slowly, turning the idea over in his head. “If we're going to build a pack. Soundproof, so nobody calls the cops on us if they hear howling. And it needs a garage,” he added a moment later, thinking of the camaro ( _his_ car now, he supposed).

“Guest rooms,” Peter continued, building their list of requirements, “in case the betas decide they'd rather live with uncle Peter –”

“You're going to call yourself uncle?” Derek interjected with a half-grin and a raised brow.

“– than their own poor excuse for a family. I will be choosing ones who won't be missed,” he told Derek, acknowledging his nephew's teasing with a very lupine grin that said he knew full well how horribly wrong it sounded, “just in case they die rather than turn. A horrible home life just means they'll be more likely to be grateful enough to keep their mouths shut if they see uncle Peter fucking big brother Derek.”

“Stiles might count as pack,” Derek said after a moment's thought. “If he wanted to. Not Scott.”

“Scott's a lost cause. Stiles... I like Stiles for pack.”

“Son of the sheriff,” Derek noted, and rolled his eyes at Peter's faux-innocent look.

He didn't do innocent very well. He never had.

He could lie, to humans and wolves alike, but he wasn't the kind of person for whom innocence came easily.

“I'd like to get a house with you,” Derek said after a moment, shifting slightly on the bed so that he was looking at his uncle properly, “I'd like to build a pack. Have a home again instead of just somewhere I live. With you. I love you.”

Peter's eyes crinkled at the corners with his smile, showing a warmth that was reserved for him and him alone. “I love you too, duckling. I always have.”


	11. A Footnote

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Marlena receives an unexpected visit.

It was the end of the day. Five past five o'clock on a Tuesday afternoon.

The clock ticked steadily on the wall, the only sound in an otherwise silent office.

Marlena McCaffery sat in her big comfy chair, finishing up her notes from her last session. Like most therapists she made sure to space her appointments to give herself time in between. Most often that time was used to write notes, to tidy up client files and flick through her previous notes for the next appointment.

Sometimes it was used to decompress after a particularly challenging session, to make a cup of tea and regain her professional detachment.

She had no further appointments today, was expecting no visitors or deliveries, so it was a little surprising to hear it when someone suddenly knocked on the door. At five past five when all she really wanted to do was finish up and go home to a nice dinner and a glass of wine.

Marlena stood and went to open the door, genuinely surprised when she saw who was standing outside. Two men, the younger of which she recognised immediately even though they'd only ever had the one session together.

Derek Hale.

He'd made an impression in that one single appointment, and not just because he was unusually striking to look at – the sort of handsome one generally didn't see every day. No. It had been the way he'd spoken, simultaneously defeated and yet defiant. Bluntly honest about how he felt about therapy. Even more bluntly honest about why he was there at all, clearly not expecting to be listened to and anticipating that he'd simply be dismissed as the dangerously delusional young man listed in her paperwork.

He'd looked and sounded like ten pounds of angry stuffed into a five pound bag, desperately crying out for someone to just _listen_.

So she'd listened. And then she'd reached out.

The last she'd heard of him he was somewhere outside of New York, outside of his sister's influence, presumably homeless and openly admitting to not exactly being safe. And now he was here, standing outside her office in Manhattan dressed in a leather jacket and accompanied by an equally handsome man somewhere in his mid-thirties.

“Derek?” Marlena asked dumbly, blinking at the young man in surprise.

“Hi,” Derek said casually, none of that anger or tenseness hiding anywhere in his posture or tone. “Mind if we come in?”

“I – no. Please,” Marlena stepped aside, holding the door open for Derek and his companion. She took a short breath, setting aside her surprise. Technically she could still count this as being on the clock. She could spare a minute for a former patient. “What brings you here?”

Derek shrugged, the movement loose and easy. “I wanted to say thanks. Out of everyone Laura forced me to speak to, you actually listened. I mean, you couldn't have helped me because you never would've believed me...” He grinned. It was a good look for him. “That's sort of why we're here. Peter – this is Peter, by the way –”

“Hello.” The other man raised a hand in greeting, his mouth curved into a smile that was more of an amused smirk.

“– thought it'd be better to come in person than to send a video. It's not like we actually want our secret getting out and being a psychiatrist you probably would've wanted to share it. I mean, the one video we could have sent without risking it didn't show much.”

“Peter,” Marlena repeated, deciding for the moment not to follow that thread about video recordings, “as in your maternal uncle Peter?”

“The one and the same,” Peter replied with a nod, if anything looking even more amused as he offered her a hand to shake. His hand, when she took it, was warm, his grip firm without being intimidating or overbearing. “It's nice to meet you.”

“Thank you...” She couldn't help but frown slightly, looking back and forth between the two of them even as the pieces started to come together in her mind.

It was habit to make connections based on observations, and connections were forming between the evidence in front of her and what she remembered from the previous contact she’d had with Derek as a client.

She’d already guessed that something had happened to make him leave his sister, something significant enough that he’d rather sleep on the streets (she remembered him protesting when she’d offered to get him in touch with a shelter, but he hadn’t sounded particularly convincing) somewhere he admitted to not being safe than remain under his sister’s care.

There was a note somewhere in Derek’s files that she remembered reading, that his maternal uncle – identified in his previous three therapists’ notes as a man who’d groomed him from an early age – was permanently out of the picture.

Clearly that permanence hadn’t had anything to do with death. There had been no indication that he’d ever been incarcerated (or even formally accused). So it was possible that Laura had simply been keeping his whereabouts under wraps to prevent Derek running off to try and find him.

The fact that they were here now, together, indicated that whatever had happened in the time since Derek had disappeared had involved reconnecting with his uncle. But that didn’t explain what they were doing here, at her office, where she could technically be under obligation to report Derek’s whereabouts.

“I'm not sure I quite understand why you're here,” she admitted after a moment, trying to choose her words so as not to sound judgemental or cause offence. “I can't imagine that it's just to let me know that you're together. You've mentioned a secret that I would be inclined to share, but it doesn't seem to me your relationship would warrant such concern?”

“Oh, it's not our relationship we'd prefer to keep a secret,” Peter's smile was somehow sharp, wolfish in a way that Marlena usually associated with personality disorders. “I did my due diligence on that, thank you. It's technically only illegal if we want to get married. No, we came here because my nephew would like to show you something. I say 'show',” he clarified, clearly enjoying himself, “because he's already told you. Apparently he's been telling his therapists for years.”

Derek shrugged. “Laura made me. Technically she only made me tell them about hurting myself,” he said, surprisingly at ease, “but you say 'claws' and it's all downhill from there.”

“You're talking about how you may or may not be a werewolf,” Marlena came to the realisation out loud.

He’d said as much openly in their session. She’d thought it was a pretty typical belief for a troubled young man to have. A classic maladaptive coping mechanism that hinted at some schizoid personality issues but that wasn’t particularly troubling on its own.

The two men exchanged glances, Derek's eyebrows slightly raised as if in question.

Much to Marlena’s confusion Peter inclined his head slightly in an obvious go-ahead.

Derek blinked. Just blinked. And suddenly his eyes glowed a vibrant neon blue.

His face changed, bones shifting beneath the skin, developing a heavier brow and broader bridge of the nose. Eyebrows disappeared (where did they go!?), and mutton chops sprouted from cheekbone to jaw. Ears pointed and elongated at the tip, almost elfin but somehow canine. A mouth full of fangs. Claws. Claws at least half an inch long and probably longer, visibly strong and with viciously pointed tips.

She watched it all happen. In front of her. No tricks that she could see, no sleight of hand.

She looked at Peter and had to stop herself from gasping at the suddenly monstrous visage he was presenting, the ridges of his face seemingly much more pronounced than his nephew's, eyes glowing red from the hollows beneath his slanted brow.

And somehow, though it didn't make sense to think about, he actually seemed to have gotten _taller_ , his shoulders broader beneath his jacket. The fabric strained at the seams where before it had been perfectly tailored. Wrists exposed where before the jacket had been long enough to cover them.

That could have been trickery, stage magic, mechanical costuming, if it weren’t for the way she could _see_ the claws grow out over his fingernails as it happened, the fingers themselves growing _longer_ to accommodate their new appendages.

Marlena groped blindly for the chair behind her.

She sat down in it heavily, distantly aware that the look on her face must be something similar to that of a fish – eyes wide and mouth open.

She felt like she couldn't breathe, like her brain had gone offline in shock and needed time to reboot.

As it did she began to realise the implications of what she was seeing. Slowly, surely, the realisations swamped her.

Derek was a werewolf.

He wasn't delusional, he'd never experienced hallucinations like his previous therapists had written in their notes. He hadn't even been using metaphors or fantasies to communicate his feelings. He was an _actual_ werewolf.

“Oh my God.”

She had pages of notes that Dr Zellek had faxed over when she'd accepted his referral. Typed out in plain black and white they explained Derek's elaborate fantasies of self harm, the vision of himself he'd constructed in his head to deal with the loss of his family. He saw his anger as being monstrous, the notes explained, saw himself as being ‘other’ as a way to justify his experiences. And possibly as a way to explain why his uncle had fixated on him.

But it had all been real.

Not a metaphor. Not a delusion.

Derek was really a werewolf. Derek really _had_ repeatedly clawed his arms open as a teenager. He’d been telling his therapists the truth for six years and not one of them had ever been positioned to believe him. And it was likely, very very likely, that Laura had known that when she’d coerced him into telling them.

“Oh my God.”

Peter's grin looked much more sinister with his more monstrous visage and a mouth full of sharp teeth. “Duckling, I think we broke her,” he said cheerfully. Marlena watched his features slowly melt back to human, those extra inches of height and bulk disappearing back into nothingness until only the man from before remained.

“We’ve done what you wanted,” he added, casually adjusting his clothes to sit better on his shoulders after the transformation. “Lets go back to the hotel and get dinner.”

“In a second,” Derek answered, taking his uncle’s lead and changing back.

He crouched down in front of her a moment later, claws gone, face normal again.

“I just wanted you to know what I meant,” he said to her, a strange look on his face – sympathy mixed with steel, “when I said you couldn't help me. It meant a lot that you actually listened to what I said, even if you thought I was delusional. We had one session and you cared enough to try and find out if I was alright. It was... nice. I wanted you to have the truth in case you ever came across someone else who 'may or may not be' a werewolf.”

He stood, leaving her still sitting there in shock, and moved to stand beside his uncle.

“Nice to meet you,” Peter said again.

And then they left, shutting the door behind them.

It was five fifteen.

It had only been ten minutes.

Marlena McCaffery covered her face with her hands.

This is what she got for actually caring about her clients.


End file.
